Opel Adam

The Opel Adam is a 3-door hatchback from Opel, built from 2012 to 2019, as electrification stopped being an experiment and the crossover took every market. Under the bonnet: Petrol engine. Darren Luke drew it.

The story

The Opel Adam is a city car engineered and produced by the German car manufacturer Opel, and is named after the company's founder Adam Opel. It was sold under the Vauxhall marque in the United Kingdom. It was launched in France at the 2012 Paris Motor Show, with sales starting in the beginning of 2013.

On 10 October 2018, Opel and its British subsidiary, Vauxhall, announced that in order to optimise its model lineup and focus on high volume segments, the company would retire its Adam, Karl, Cascada and Viva models after the end of their life cycles, in approximately one year. No successor model will replace the Adam, as the company announced intentions to focus on SUVs, notably a new Opel Mokka, as part of a strategy to increase company SUV sales from 25% to 40% by 2021. On 29 April 2019, the Opel and Vauxhall website configurator for new Adam cars was replaced by a list of available stock; production came to an end on 3 May 2019.

What is underneath

Power comes from Petrol engine; other versions carried different engines, listed in the specification table below. It weighs 1086 -. It shifts through a 5-speed manual / 6-speed manual / 5-speed Easytronic automated manual. The layout matters: the engine drives the front wheels, the packaging choice that gives a small car a big cabin. The wheelbase is 2311 mm. These are manufacturer figures carried by Wikipedia and Wikidata, not road-test measurements.

Its place in the line

Its family tree is legible: it took over from the Opel Agila; assembly was at Eisenach (Opel Eisenach GmbH), Germany. Its contemporaries in the catalogue — the Tesla Model X, the Peugeot 208, the Mazda CX-5 — show what else the money bought that year. Nearby in the Opel catalogue sit the Opel Sintra and the Opel K-180.