Karl a welcome addition to Opel family
This is part of the plan for Opel going forward, the company representative insisted — and Opel is sticking with that plan, believing the small car market is going to deliver big gains.
But it was ever thus as Opel has always had a fairly busy nursery for its many babies. The thing is, though, that with the Karl it has re-taken charge of an area in which it was, until recently, happy to rebadge other people’s creations. Various Agilas were Suzuki products — and none the worst for that— but with the Karl, Opel has decided to do things itself.
Karl, Opel insists, is an entry model with “no ostentation” and “no hollow bling bling” and will play a role for the company in providing buying customers with an entry to the Opel portfolio and hopefully keeping them over the course of time.
According to Diane Schreiber, product marketing manager for Karl, the company’s intention was to bring the car into the various markets at a price around the 10k mark — it will be €11,995 here in Ireland— to deliberately undercut its own Adam model.
The two cars, she told those at the launch, are roughly the same size, but the key difference is that Karl has five doors (to Adam’s three) and five seats. It will also come with fewer options and only one engine choice.
“The Karl is our strongest ever offering in the small car segment,” she maintained.
This fact was underlined by lead development engineer Werner Joris, who stressed that while options were limited on Karl, the car nevertheless would be available with such as a lane departure warning system, cruise control, cornering lights, six airbags, a 7” touchscreen, and Opel’s Intellink system and its OnStar system which makes the car a wifi hot spot.
So far, so good, then. They’ve packed a lot into this diminutive thing and under the hood they also have a completely new engine and- guess what — it’s a three-cylinder petrol engine. Seems like we’ve mentioned the increasing popularity of these units here recently.
Opel says that although both Adam and Corsa models have their own three pots, this is a newly developed mill, designed to run normally aspirated, rather than with the turbos used in the company’s other three cylinder engines.
That the company promised the all-aluminium engine was smooth and comfortable to live with, the surprise was that it turned out to be exactly so. With 55 kW (75 bhp) on tap it is also the most powerful entry level engine in the segment.
It is allied to a five-speed manual gearbox and will return 4.3 l/100km (65 mpg) while emitting just 99 g/km. and that latter figure will drop further in the coming months with a start/stop system being developed.
Having driven the car in Holland recently, I can report that the company’s claim, that this is a high quality vehicle for the price, is not at all wide of the mark.
Everything about it suggests it will be a hit with the buying public and even though Irish punters will be paying considerably more than their German counterparts for it, the Karl still represents value for money here.
When it goes on sale in August, the Karl will indeed be a new baby Opel, but it certainly has enough tricks up its sleeve to be a credible entry-model contender for a wide variety of buyers.
