RUSSELSHEIM, GERMANY - Another day, another new model that South Africans will likely never get to experience.
This is the Opel Insignia, and it’s just been given a facelift for the European market. The large sedan will inevitably move over to the Peugeot 508’s platform now that PSA owns the German brand, but it’s still too early in the vehicle’s life cycle to justify a complete redesign so for now the Insignia remains one of the last products of the General Motors era.
However, Opel has just freshened up the liftback and estate in various places, not only through a sharper design, but also with new technologies.
Among these is a new adaptive IntelliLux Pixel headlight system that now features 84 LED elements per light, for faster reactions and more precision than ever.
Opel hasn’t announced the engine line-up as yet, but the company does promise that it will come with “all-new, highly-efficient” petrol and diesel motors. The updated range is likely to include the 1.4-litre three-cylinder turbopetrol unit that was recently announced in the facelifted Astra, which is itself a hodgepodge of GM and PSA technologies.
A new GSI version will also hopefully follow in due course.
Available gadgets in the 2020 Insignia include a new digital rear view camera as well as radar-based rear-traffic alert, forward collision alert, pedestrian detection, wireless charging and head-up display.
The Insignia is built in Opel’s hometown of Rüsselsheim, where 1.2-million units (comprising two generations) have rolled off the line in the last decade.