Lancia Delta

This is the catalogue record of the Lancia Delta, one of 116 models Lancia has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1979. 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 Lancia Delta properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. 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 Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz G-Class, the Dodge Dodge Ram, the Audi AG Audi Quattro — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lancia Delta reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol: / 1.1 L Straight-four engine / I4 / 1.3 L I4 / 1.5 L I4 / 1.6 L I4 / 1.6 L Turbocharger / turbo I4 / 2.0 L Fiat Twin Cam engine / 831 D5/E5 DO; kerb weight is recorded at 955 -; drive goes through 4-speed Manual transmission / manual / 5-speed manual / 3-speed Automatic transmission / automatic; the layout is Transverse front-engine, front-wheel-drive / Transverse four-wheel-drive. 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 Lancia story

Within Lancia's own catalogue the Lancia Delta sits alongside the Lancia 037, the Lancia 2000, the Lancia Alfa-12HP, the Lancia Appia. The record names the successor = as its predecessor, anchoring one end of its lineage. Design is credited to Giorgetto Giugiaro at Italdesign. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Chivasso, Piedmont (Chivasso plant).

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.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Lancia Delta was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.