Hello and welcome to another Optional Extra update, this time about the Vauxhall Astra.
So the first thing I thought I'd mention is that some people when they watch my videos
they comment that I spend a lot of time on let's say the first version of a car
and when it comes to the latter versions of the car, let's say it's a car that has six revisions,
the sixth revision I just kind of rush through and I don't really talk about it very much.
So partly this is because I'm talking about the the first version of the car is
basically the most important one. It's the conception of the vehicle, it's setting a
standard for what's going to happen. It's also very successful. So it's really the start of
what's going to happen with the car. Another problem that I have though is that there's
actually more information about the first versions of a particular car. So for example the Vauxhall
Astra - there's a lot of information online thanks to people who've done research and looked into it
about the first and the second versions of the car. But there's really not very much
information about the development processes of the seventh version or the eighth version. So
you're stuck a little bit in the fact that I actually have less information. And part of
that reason is because people obviously... Like the websites that I go to they've spent the time,
they have the nostalgia for the car, they want to put the time in to find out what happened to their
favorite car, and there's a nostalgia factor to that which of course there isn't for newer cars.
There's also the fact that some of these designers have retired and maybe you can talk to them,
like I've done with Steve Harper and Patrick Le Quément. But of course with newer cars these
people haven't retired. They're still working, they've got busy jobs, they haven't got time
to be talking to people about nostalgia fuelled dreams. So those are part of the reasons why I
have that problem. So anyway if you're wondering why I spent more time on the first versions
rather than the latter versions now you know! So another thing is this video is consciously
about the Vauxhall Astra, which isn't an original car. The Opel Kadett is the original car
and of course it's Opel doing all the work to design that, although I talk a little bit about
Vauxhall and how they tried a restyle which was ultimately unsuccessful. But the reason
I'm doing this, this is consciously a video about a rebranding versus a car that's the original car,
and as I say this is a conscious effort to talk about that. Because there are many many
different cars around the world which are just rebrandings of other existing cars.
Even in this video you see there's Chevrolets, there's Saturns, there's Holdens - versions of
this Opel car. The Opel Kadett which became the Opel Astra. So one day I may do a video just
focusing on the Opel Kadett and the motivations around Opel in the 70s and 80s and 90s and
beyond, to talk about exactly what they were looking at. But I figured this would be a good
video to talk about essentially the British side of it. It also helped that most people who watch
my videos are British and of course they will feel most closely associated with the Vauxhall brand.
So in 1975 talking about Vauxhall and the end of Vauxhall design.
In 1975 I think around then essentially the whole Vauxhall design department was cut.
Vauxhall were producing interesting cars but they had a really bad reputation from the 1950s and 60s
as being just complete rot boxes. But another problem that Vauxhall as a car company had in
the 1970s was Opel was just so much better. The Opel Kadett, the T-car platform of the early 70s
which turned out to be the Vauxhall Chevette, that was the car that GM looked at and said "That's
really a well put together car. Opel are really doing good things. We really need that because
there's been this oil crisis and suddenly we need small cars in America". And so Opel's
light gets to shine because they get to import their car into America and Detroit gets to see -
wow, Opel is really firing in all cylinders. At the same time you've got Vauxhall as a car company
producing cars that aren't selling so well, and there's also concerns about reliability of course,
and so Vauxhall star's on the wane in the 70s. And at the same time GM
and Chrysler of course are looking towards Ford's European model about how to produce cars. Ford had
an operation in Britain, they had an operation in Germany that again were producing different cars.
And in the mid 60s they make a conscious effort to say we won't make cars which overlap Ford Britain
and Ford Germany's lineup. So we're going to merge our models. Initially they had problems
because of course Britain was using the imperial system and Germany was using the metric system,
but these problems had to be solved and Ford solved them very well. They had Germany making
some models they made, had Britain making other models, and eventually they would essentially
merge the operations again, but they would do a very good job doing it and GM and Chrysler
took notice. And so with the Vauxhall design department and an Opel design department, and Opel
doing really well it was a matter of time before Vauxhall was essentially going to get the chop.
And so that just left the Vauxhall styling department and again Ford was showing that
you didn't really need to have separate styling departments for different countries around Europe.
You could just sell one car in Britain, you can sell one car in Germany, one car in France,
and it would look the same, and people would just be very happy to accept it because
why wouldn't they! I mean it's essentially the same car.
But I do feel that General Motors was maybe a bit timid in getting rid of the Vauxhall name. Yes,
Vauxhall had an historic name that went back decades. Yes it was very British,
and yes people don't like the fact that Marathon was renamed Snickers just to try and
consolidate everything into a one European whole. But we were moving more European in the 1970s
and people can take the fact that you renamed things. Yes there's short term pain for long-term
gain because you then get to consolidate all of your marketing and sales messages across all of
Europe. For example, European football matches of course are watched all over Europe and the
advertising hoardings are seen by people again all over Europe. Well, it would make sense for General
Motors to be able to put Opel branded advertising up there rather than having to worry about maybe
putting Vauxhall branding up and Opel branding. So it saves on marketing budget. But even in 2005
Vauxhall and Opel had different letters for their sporty models. Vauxhall used VXR
and presumably for Vauxhall Racing, and then on the continent they used OPC for Opels.
One thing that struck me while making the video, and I try and talk about this a little
bit but I'm not sure I really get get the message across properly is that Opel, when they designed
the Kadett they designed the car to be just good enough. The reason why you don't see many of these
80s versions of the Opel Kadett and the Vauxhall Astra on the road now is because of course they've
all rotted and the mechanicals have gone, but at the end of the day Opel were trying to make a car
that as I say was just good enough. It was easy to maintain, so it's great for fleet managers.
It was great for the first 10 years of its life, but it wasn't designed to be a car that lasted
for 30 or 40 years, and people weren't buying it for that. If you know you wanted to buy
a new Opel Kadett or a new Vauxhall Astra you weren't thinking, "Oh I'm going to keep this car
for 30, 40 years". And Vauxhall and Opel were very smart in just making a car that was essentially as
I say just good enough, because that makes it cheaper to produce which means the cost comes
down for the consumer and they can buy a cheaper car, and they can get the car that they want,
and as I've pointed out Opel spent the time making the mechanicals easy to repair,
which again brought down the total cost of ownership making the entire cost for the car
cheaper, which was music to both consumers and fleet managers ears. They weren't thinking about
the longevity of the car. So in my mind Opel was right in making a car that was just good enough,
just like in the 13th century they made churches that were way over engineered because they didn't
understand all the force load calculations and things like that, that went into making a building
and as we did, and particularly as we created more sophisticated ways of being able to work
that out using computers. You now find you have bridges and buildings that are
just strong enough to stand up. No more, no less, and that's so that they can use
the minimum amount of material. They can be as cheap as possible. But they don't need to be any
stronger because they're never going to fall down if they're maintained the way that they should.
So there's so much in this video. It was a 30 minute video but it's covering such a vast topic
that don't be offended if your bit didn't get in. There were bits that I realised that I also missed
when when I was actually doing the video and doing all the extra photos and videos that I put
on top of the of the video. One thing that I missed that I'm sure there's many others
I missed, but one thing that I noticed that I missed was in the 1980s - was it Daewoo?
I'm trying to get the right brand. Daewoo is how you would say it in England but I think people in
korea say Daewoo. That there was a car called the Daewoo LeMans which was essentially a mk2 Vauxhall
Astra - a mid-1980s Opel Kadett. That got imported into the US as the Pontiac LeMans I think in 1986,
which which went on for a few years. So again there was there were lots of different versions
and Opel took this or General Motors took this car all around the world and sold it in many,
many different ways, and it's hard to keep up! So one thing I also thought which I mentioned
in the video that I thought Vauxhall and Opel really missed a trick on with hybrid cars. In my
Toyota Prius video I talk a lot about hybrids, and there was a real rush to hybrid technology
in the early 2000s as people saw that essentially you can get another 10 miles per gallon for free
essentially with a hybrid drivetrain which was not that much more expensive than a regular
drivetrain. So it seemed to me that General Motors really missed a beat. They were too slow
in bringing hybrid drivetrains to their range of cars and that can be seen in the Vauxhall
Astra which up until 2021 hasn't had a hybrid drivetrain. They've tried to improve their engines
and they've tried to make them more efficient, and that's great but when particularly in
Europe there's so many cars nowadays that they've just changed to having hybrid or
plug-in hybrid drivetrains because they're so much more efficient. It's taken the Vauxhall
Astra way too long to get to that point. One last thing I thought I'd mention is that
with Onstar. Maybe the reason why I talk about Onstar is because I used to work for Microsoft
and the department I was in created the competitor to Onstar, the Ford SYNC system. And so
we were spending a lot of time paying a lot of close attention to General Motors OnStar
system in the late 90s and the work that they were doing. And it looks like rather than being this
concierge feature, they've given up on that whole concierge thing because people can essentially
just dial 999 or 911 or whatever they want to call and get to emergency services, and no one's really
willing to pay for that technology. And so it seems what they were trying to pitch in the
last few years, the 2015 version of the Vauxhall Astra was to try and make it into some sort of 4g
data sharing service for the car. But again you're fighting a losing battle there because
if you've got a cell phone - a lot of cell phones nowadays you can just data share from
those anyway, or most people tend to have a phone which has a data plan on it. And
kids have a data plan in the back seat. So again I think they were fighting a bit of
a losing battle with that one. Then of course when Vauxhall and Opel got sold to Stellantis
then of course they had to get rid of the OnStar service anyway. And it probably wasn't doing very
well, so they just dropped the whole thing. Anyway that's the Optional Extra for the Vauxhall Astra.
Thank you for watching. I really appreciate you watching these videos and I hope you get
a bit more out of these extra videos. So I'll see you in the next video!