Opel will give UK subsidiary Vauxhall more engineering freedom to adapt its cars for its home market, in line with an ongoing commitment to preserving the British marque’s role in the Stellantis group.
Stellantis – parent company of Opel-Vauxhall, as well as other European marques Alfa Romeo, Citroën, DS, Fiat, Lancia and Peugeot – recently announced that it would channel the bulk of its future investments into its four best-performing global brands, raising questions about the viability of others.
It chose Peugeot, Ram, Jeep and Fiat on the basis that their “multi-regional presence” gave them “the greatest scale and the highest potential for profitability”, while also announcing that DS and Lancia would be repositioned as “specialty brands” focused on their home markets of France and Italy.
The move would seem to represent a rationalisation of Stellantis’s sprawling portfolio aimed at reducing complexity – but Opel boss Florian Huettl says the Bedfordshire-born Vauxhall marque will continue to play a “very clear” role in the company, and its cars in the UK could become more bespoke than they have been in more than four decades.
Vauxhall has not made its own cars since effectively merging with Germany’s Opel in the early 1970s and has been a UK-only operation for almost as long, sparking questions over its continued viability as a marque in its own right.
But asked whether there remains a place for Vauxhall in the new Stellantis corporate structure, Huettl told Autocar: “Opel and Vauxhall have a very clear identity and a very clear role within the group,” referencing Opel’s performance in Germany – where it is Stellantis’s best-selling brand – and in the UK, where the Corsa and Frontera both rank in the top 10 most popular cars.
He added that the brand will in fact take on an expanded engineering role as part of a move to boost its competitiveness in its historic UK homeland, where it is currently outsold by French sibling Peugeot.
“There’s no doubt about the importance of Opel and Vauxhall,” said Huettl, “and what we will again discuss with you in due time is that we intend to give more possibilities for more differentiation and more adaptation of Vauxhall to the UK market than what has probably been done in the past.
“We have a specific project together with our Vauxhall team […] to make sure that the cars, when it comes to the execution especially of the chassis specificities, clearly respond to what we need,” he added, in possible reference to the far worse state of UK roads compared with Germany’s.
He did not give specifics about the extent of work that will be possible, and it remains to be seen which model will be the first beneficiary, but he emphasised that the company will work to meet “the specific needs of UK customers”.