Michael Taylor•19 Oct 2012
NEWS
Opel Cascada unveil
Svelte new convertible from GM's German brand embraces soft-top designAustralia’s freshest car brand could get a whole lot fresher with the unveil in Europe yesterday of the long-awaited convertible version of Opel’s Astra.
The Cascada will hit European showrooms early next year and could be in Australia by early 2014 and is yet another European convertible to ditch folding metal roofs in favour of old-school cloth systems.
It follows hot on the heels of Opel’s first Australian motor show under its own brand and comes only six months after it showed the highly regarded three-door hatch to its European homeland. It’s also some welcome good news for Opel in Germany, where the brand has been both financially embattled and consistently beaten up by not only arch-rival Volkswagen, but increasingly by the Koreans as well.
The move to cloth is not a retrograde step, Opel has argued, but allows the roof to be lifted up or down in 17 seconds at the flick of a switch at speeds up to 50km/h. Even better, it can be opened or closed remotely from up to 30 metres away by pushing a button on the key fob.
It’s both longer, at 4697mm, and wider (1850mm) than the Astra sedan, even though it shares the four-door’s wheelbase and core architecture. It might look like a roofless version of the Astra Coupe, but the Cascada is far bigger than the nimble little hatch and is even longer than Audi’s A5 convertible.
Opel promises the Cascada will only lose 80 litres of luggage space to the sedan when the roof is up, though its 350 litres of space plummets to 280 litres when the top half of the boot space is filled with roof giblets. To counter this, Opel suggests it will add a push-button setup to drop the rear seats, which will add space but only when there’s nobody sitting back there.
It will cost more than the superseded Astra TwinTop convertible in Europe, even though the more expensive metal roof has been turfed. Opel is not regarded as a premium brand in Europe and there is some desperation from head office that this must be the car that allows it to push prices higher.
While it’s based on the sedan, rather than the Coupe, it will get the more-agile Coupe’s Hi-Per front strut geometry, which effectively eliminates torque steer and debuted in the European Car of the Year-winning Insignia.
Its engines will range from a 1.4-litre four-cylinder turbo petrol motor with 103kW to a 125kW 1.6-litre motor and a 121kW turbodiesel 2.0-litre. The 1.4-litre version is not thought to be under consideration for Australia’s initial batch of Cascadas.
The car was initially designed to be paired up with a coupe – Australians may remember the strong-selling Astra coupe of a decade ago when it wore Holden badges – but the financial malaise of Opel culled it from the agenda.
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Written byMichael Taylor
Our team of independent expert car reviewers and journalists
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