How the first Opel Astra immediately became a direct hit

Even in his last year on the Dutch market, the old lady Kadett managed to become a national public favourite. What’s to be said, with a market share of 5.3 percent, he had a comfortable lead over the number 2, the significantly younger Vectra from the same house. When studying the sales figures of the first half of the 1990s, you come across unreal data as far as Opel is concerned. How about 73,000 cars sold and a market share of almost 15 percent? The Astra, which took the call sign of its British Vauxhall brother, was registered more than 40,000 times, accounting for 8.1 percent of the market. In other words: one in twelve new cars was an Astra! Well, those were different times; in 1991 we kept our WordPerfect files on small floppy disks, we still had to rely on a telephone booth to make a call on the road and the world wide web had to wait a few more years.

In this context, the Astra could call itself a true marvel of innovation with its multi-info display on the center console. Fittingly, ‘On Every Street’ by Dire Straits was the best-selling album of the year, because exactly that could be said of the Astra in no time. As always, a strong point was the very wide choice of models, engines and versions; Opel immediately released both the hatchback and the station wagon, while the impressive GSi joined as the sporty tastemaker. As a 16V with 150 hp, it was a more than serious competitor for the Golf GTI. That, of course, applied to the Astra range as a whole, as both the Golf III and the now forgotten Citroën ZX debuted in the same season. In 1992 the Astra followed as a four-door sedan, a year later it even appeared as a convertible. Opel put a lot of emphasis on passive safety and even environmental awareness for the model: the car was constructed in such a way that it could easily be recycled after business is done. So who knows, maybe a piece of the first Astra will still swirl through the latest, now sixth generation.