Daewoo Leganza

Among the 27 Daewoo entries in the MotorJury library, the Daewoo Leganza holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1997. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Daewoo Leganza properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1990s were the decade of refinement — airbags and ABS became universal, Japanese build quality set the world standard, and the modern SUV segment was effectively invented. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Toyota Toyota Prius, the Subaru Subaru Forester, the Ford Ford Focus — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Daewoo Leganza reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2.0 L Family II engine#X20SED / X20SED Straight-four engine / I4 / 2.2 L X22SE I4; kerb weight is recorded at ~1400 kg; drive goes through 5-speed manual / 4-speed ZF Friedrichshafen / ZF ZF 4HP14 transmission / 4HP14 automatic / 4-speed General Motors / GM GM 4T40 transmission / 4T40E automatic / 4-speed Aisin AW / A; the layout is FF layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Daewoo story

Within Daewoo's own catalogue the Daewoo Leganza sits alongside the Daewoo Honker 2000, the Daewoo Arcadia, the Daewoo Cielo, the Daewoo Gentra. The record names the Daewoo Espero / Daewoo Prince as its predecessor and the Daewoo Magnus as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign. Assembly is recorded at Bupyong, South Korea (Daewoo Motors) / Cairo, Egypt (Speranza) / Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine (AvtoZAZ) / Warsaw, Poland (FSO) / Craiova, Romania (Rodae) / Hanoi, Vietnam (VIDAMCO).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Daewoo Leganza was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.