Vauxhall Viva
Vauxhall
Vauxhall
The Vauxhall Viva is a small family car that was produced by Vauxhall in a succession of three versions between 1963 and 1979. These were designated the HA, HB and HC series. The Viva was introduced a year after Vauxhall's fellow General Motors company Opel launched the Opel Kadett A. Both cars were a result of the same General Motors project sharing the same floorpan and engine construction. A major difference was the use of metric measurements for the Opel and Imperial units for the Vauxhall. The cars are visually similar, however few components are interchangeable.
A van version was also produced, as the Bedford HA. In the UK the Viva's principal competitors at the time of its launch included the well-established Ford Anglia and Morris Minor. The third generation HC series was the last solely Vauxhall designed passenger car when ceasing production in 1979. Although it was not the last Vauxhall designed vehicle to go out of production overall – that distinction belongs to the Bedford CF van. After the Viva range, General Motors Europe unified the Opel and Vauxhall brands around a single range of Opel-developed models. Vauxhall revived the Viva nameplate from 2015 to 2019 on a rebadged variant of the fourth generation Opel Karl/Chevrolet Spark.
From the Wikipedia article Vauxhall Viva, CC BY-SA.
Among the 67 Vauxhall entries in the MotorJury library, the Vauxhall Viva 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 1963. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.
To read the Vauxhall Viva properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1960s were the decade of the pony car, the mid-engined revolution and the birth of the modern hot hatchback's ancestors — engineering advanced faster than in any decade before it. 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 Pontiac Pontiac GTO, the Buick Buick Riviera, the Maserati Maserati Quattroporte — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.
On paper, the Vauxhall Viva reads like this: the record lists its engine as 1057 cc ohv inline 4; kerb weight is recorded at 1564 lb (standard) / 1628 lb (90 SL); drive goes through 4-speed manual all-synchromesh; the layout is platform =. 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.
Within Vauxhall's own catalogue the Vauxhall Viva sits alongside the Vauxhall 10-4, the Vauxhall 30/98, the Vauxhall A-Type, the Vauxhall B-Type. It was succeeded by the Vauxhall Astra / Vauxhall Chevette. Design is credited to David Jones. Assembly is recorded at United Kingdom / Australia / Azambuja, Portugal / Petone, New Zealand.
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.
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.
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 Vauxhall Viva was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.
Specifications come from the Wikipedia infobox for this model (CC BY-SA) and the open Wikidata record, and are shown only where a source actually carries them — nothing here is estimated. Figures are manufacturer specifications, not measured results.
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Ownership verdicts are computed from NHTSA complaint and recall records plus EPA economy data, re-priced for your country. Verdicts are published per model year as the data is ingested — browse them live, or open the true-cost calculator to price any year yourself.
Contemporaries from other marques, introduced within three years of this car.