AROUND 16 years ago I bought a red second hand Opel Astra; there were a lot of red Astras around at the time. It served me well and later I gave the car to my son, who had just passed his driving test and he got a few more years out of it.
I was reminded of that reliable old car last week when I picked up an attractive red coloured Opel Astra GTC. However, the only thing the cars had in common was the Opel logo and the red paint.
This is a sporty model and naturally it was a two-door; by now the family is getting used to two-door cars, but I didn’t say they were getting to like them. I thought the car was long enough to take two more doors and it certainly would have made one family happy if they had stuck on two more. They could have kept the handles discreet like Alfa or Citroen do, and we wouldn’t have minded.
The Astra has changed a lot in recent years and if you were returning to Europe from a long break in somewhere like a rain forest you wouldn’t recognise the trusty old car it was in the early nineties.
Opel was on a high back then when they were the Irish soccer team sponsors.
The Astra now looks more like the Opel Insignia and it already had that coupe look, before the
‘performance’ GTC elements were added. The front headlamps are very attractive and inside there is room for four people. You could probably squeeze a third small adult in the back if required. For the second week in-a-row my regular passenger and I enjoyed the heated front seats. Spring in Ireland is still a bit cold for leather seats.
On the dash all the controls are grouped together in a neat console.
And naturally there are plenty of slave controls on the sporty-looking steering wheel. The boot is a decent size for a sporty hatch back. No doubt the car was attractive, but I thought the alloys could have been better, I have seen fancier ones in other cars I have driven recently.
Two very small gripes. The display on the Sat Nav is very bright at night and can be a distraction, it would been nice to be able to tone it down for night driving. The second is the new style handbrake that some car companies now use. It works fine and you get a display on the dash when it’s activated. Call me old fashioned, but I would prefer the traditional style handbrake. Judging by the brochure for the car Power Red seems to be the most popular colour, but it’s also available in Olympic White in this Olympic year.
Prices for the Astra start at
?¬23,995, while the 2.0 litre diesel GTC model I tested will cost you
?¬27,995. To sum up, it was cute motor, drove well, got plenty of attention from pedestrians and fellow motorists, but it’s a pity there weren’t two more doors. The extra doors would probably have taken from the overall sporty look, but I know the family would have liked it even more.