The format of grilles has recently become a hot topic. The main responsible for this is of course the new BMW 4-series, but also at Audi, DS and many other brands a gigantic grille currently defines the family face. Thirty years ago, the situation was very different, the Opel Kadett proves.
Audience favorite Opel Kadett was not such a loud type anyway. Where the Opel of 2020 has to take the pace of the nations by equipping its civilian SUV Crossland with a rugged ‘Opel Vizor’, the Opel of the 80s preferred to improve the sober, but wildly popular Kadett.
The smooth, undeniably more modern E Kadett replaced predecessor ‘D’ in 1984. The car can be seen as a nice design-technical intermediate step between that square Kadett and the first Opel Astra, which appeared in 1991. Looking back, we see that the last Kadett and the first Astra, for example, both had a fairly flat rear window and a flat-cut rear wheel arch. Remarkable: in England, the Kadett was even called Astra from type D (in 1979), thanks to the different name of the sister brand Vauxhall.
Seamless
A striking Kadett characteristic was the front. The hood of the last Kadett ran a bit between the headlights. The logo was placed on the front edge of the hood, the grille was seamlessly integrated into the bumper. Before that time, the grille was remarkably large, although it is all not too bad by today’s standards. The neatly sorted collection of small openings, as it were, cut through the ribbed bumper strips and forced the number plate to a position at the bottom of the bumper.
This is the biggest visual difference between an early Kadett E and a post-88 one. In that year the car got a smaller grille, which was now pressed as a separate part between bumper and bonnet. This allowed the license plate to rise again a bit and created room for a larger opening at the bottom of the bumper.
Almost nothing changed on the rest of the carriage. Although the Kadett got new logos, it retained its no-nonsense appearance. A separate story is the fast Kadett GSI. From the start, it had its own, much smoother facade, and was allowed to keep that front when the rest of the range went under the knife.