CarBrandLogos archive · Opel · 1936
Built in Rüsselsheim, then in Moscow, after the tooling was taken as reparations.
Discover the storyPhoto: Charles01 · CC BY-SA 3.0
The story
Explore the ideas, engineering and context that shaped the Opel Kadett, then continue into its specifications and place in the marque's lineage.
01
The first Kadett arrived in 1936, a small unitary-bodied saloon aimed below the Olympia, and it sold well until the war stopped it. What happened next is the unusual part: the production tooling was dismantled and shipped to the Soviet Union as war reparations, where the car was put back into production as the Moskvitch 400 and built for years afterwards.
Kadett-A-10 · Kassander der Minoer at de.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0
02
Opel revived the name in 1962 with a new car and a new factory at Bochum, built specifically to fight the Volkswagen Beetle with a conventional water-cooled, front-engined, rear-wheel-drive small saloon. Successive generations through the 1960s and 1970s made it one of the best-selling cars in Europe, and the Kadett C of 1973 was General Motors' first genuine world car, sold as a Vauxhall Chevette, an Isuzu Gemini and a Chevrolet in several markets.
Coupe - Opel Kadett A · Oxfordian Kissuth · CC BY-SA 3.0
03
The Kadett D of 1979 brought front-wheel drive and a transverse engine, putting Opel properly into the Golf's territory, and the Kadett E that followed was named European Car of the Year for 1985 and sold in enormous numbers. Its GSi versions gave the range genuine performance credibility, and rally versions competed at the top level.
Blue oldtimer pic1 · AlfvanBeem · CC0
04
In 1991 Opel renamed the car Astra, and the badge lived on elsewhere: Daewoo built the Kadett E in Korea as the Nexia and in other markets for years, long after Rüsselsheim had moved on.
Technical specification
Badge at launch
This is the marque emblem that accompanied the Kadett's era. The full identity timeline is documented in the brand archive.
Explore the logo history →From the journal
Lineage
Contemporaries from the 1930s
Spotted something wrong on this page? Send us the correction — with a source, and we will fix it. How this site is written.
