#opel

Chevrolet will not be the sole brand in GM’s stable to offer a diesel passenger car. According to reports, Buick is next up for a diesel engine. It’s not known which Buick would get an oil burner but the likely candidate is the Verano, which shares a platform with Chevy’s Cruze, which is now available with a four cylinder turbo diesel in the U.S. The Opel Astra, even more closely related to the Verano, already offers a 1.9 liter CTDI diesel in Europe.

Illustration by Thilophilus Chin

Opel Chairman Karl-Thomas Neumann told reporters gathered at the Frankfurt Motor Show that General Motors is considering selling the Opel Adam subcompact in the United States as a Buick. “We are looking at it,” Neumann told Automotive News. “Nothing is decided. But it’s an example of some of the Opel product being used elsewhere in the world.”

Opel and Buick already share some product. The Opel Insignia is sold as the Buick Regal and the small Opel Mokka crossover is marketed as the Buick Encore. The Encore has been selling at about double the rate that GM expected, proving that GM’s near-luxury brand Buick can sell small cars.

Opel’s foray into the Australian market, which began in late October, 2012, has come to an end. Having sold just under 1600 vehicles in that time period, Opel has decided that the Australian market is not viable for its wares.

Amid labor unrest in Korea, and a desire to utilize capacity in Europe, G M is moving production of the Opel Mokka (aka, the Buick Encore, and Canada’s Chevrolet Trax) out of Korea and into a facility in Zaragoza, Spain.

GM wants to move Opel upmarket (again,) to allow more breathing space for Chevrolet in Europe, Reuters reports. Frustrated Opel dealers say GM needs to declare what it wants, and stick with it for a change.

GM’s ailing Opel hopes to enter the American and Chinese markets, and through that for a speedier recuperation. It wants to do that under cover: Made in Europe Opels, sold abroad as Buicks. This according to a report in Opel’s hometown paper Mainzer Allgemeine Zeitung.

The Cadillac Catera, a rebadged Opel Omega that was supposed to entice car shoppers about 50 years younger than the typical (non-Escalade) Cadillac buyer of the time, disappeared from the streets of North America without leaving much of a trace. Sufficient Cateras remain, however, to ensure that examples will show up in wrecking yards from time to time; in this series, we’ve seen this ’97, this ’98, and now today’s find.

Mired in the same overcapacity crisis as the rest of Europe’s auto makers, the founding family of PSA is reportedly willing to give up control of the company that owns Peugeot and Citroen in exchange for a fresh infusion of capital from GM, which currently owns 7 percent of PSA.

“To suffer”

With luck- and hapless Susan Docherty cleaning out her desk in Europe, GM needs someone else to lead Chevrolet in Europe. They found Thomas Sedran, who will take the helm at Chevrolet’s EU HQ in Zurich, Switzerland. Sedran will start in July, says Reuters, while Docherty will be leaving GM in September.

Opel and Buick are going to get a lot cozier in the coming years if Dan Akerson has his way. The GM CEO wants the two companies to align their product portfolios even further, so that the high R&D costs of Opel products can be absorbed further.

Opel workers, managers, German politicians and TTAC have been heard complaining that Opel is being kept out of interesting growth markets and pretty much forced to suffer in Europe. The perennial nags are being thrown a bone: GM “will build a small number of its Opel Corsa hatchbacks in Belarus from next year as its European brand seeks to diversify outside its core market,” Reuters says.

GM says it’s not true (yet) what Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports today. The paper says it has it on good authority that by 2014, GM will move production of its Chevrolet Cruze from South Korea to the Opel plant in Gliwice, Poland.

GM has rocky relations with its Korean unions, and the relations will get a lot rockier if what Germany’s Handelsblatt says is true. According to the report, GM is seriously looking into moving most of the production of the Opel Mokka to Europe.

Currently, the hot selling SUVlet is made in South Korea only. Says Reuters:

First signs of the interaction between Opel and its Bochum workforce getting nasty. Today, Opel workers in Bochum stopped the lines for several hours to attend a so-called “information session” with the works council, Germany’s Automobilwoche [sub] says.

Now that Opel workers in Bochum refused a plan to keep the factory open, now that an intervention by UAW’s Bob King went exactly nowhere, the question is where to move production of the Opel Zafira when Bochum closes its doors by end of 2014.

In the running: Rüsselsheim, Germany, and Ellesmere Port, UK.