Opel’s visionary city car that could have been an Aussie Holden | Drive Flashback

This story by Phil Scott originally published in Drive on 26 May, 1996

I'm on the speedbowl at Dudenhofen in Germany, peeling off the high-banked oval track at 130km/h, changing gears with a finger flip on a dashboard-mounted rocker switch. No clutch, no exhaust pollution to speak of and nothing behind me.

The car is just 2.9m long but it's as cheeky as a whip and enough fun to make you believe a green motoring future doesn't have to mean golf cart performance.

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The prototype belongs to Opel, is worth just under $3 million and is called Maxx.

Over the next six months, several hundred Germans will drive Maxx and answer the trick question in a carefully constructed research brief.

Would they be prepared to pay $23,000 to own a car which never uses more than five litres of fuel for every 100km travelled, emits clean exhaust and transforms from the pocket-sized two-door runabout to a beach buggy in five minutes?

If Opel, Holden's German sister company in General Motors, is convinced more than 50,000 customers will put their cheque books where their environmental concerns are, then Maxx will get the green light, along with a slightly stretched four-door sister model (below).

Opel has done its sums and can offer Maxx to the market with better zip than a Barina (0 to 100km/h in 12.2 seconds), fuel consumption of 3.9 litres/100km at a cruising speed of 90km/h and some outstanding crash safety features. First among them is a super strong extruded aluminium cage construction to which Maxx's lightweight body panels are fixed.

The aluminium space frame is the key to giving this tiny car, with its interior roominess, comparable crash safety to conventional steel-bodied vehicles such as the Barina, Festiva or Toyota's new Starlet, with about one-third less the weight. Maxx tips the scales at 650kg. A Barina weighs 900kg.

Low weight means better performance and lower fuel consumption – but the question mark is safety.

Conventional wisdom says it's impossible to build a vehicle shorter than 3m and still make it safe. Lack of length equates to an absence of enough crumple zone to absorb energy.

By using a very stiff aluminium cage instead of a pressed steel body, General Motors in Europe says tiny cars are possible, but only if airbags and seatbelts are tuned to complement each other.

Opel's safety research team presented a research paper at a world safety congress in Melbourne earlier this month detailing the breakthroughs they had made with Maxx. It raised a few eyebrows among the boffins but the public remains to be convinced.

Clever work on seating position – upright and high off the ground – and cockpit layout create the impression you're driving a much larger car.

The one-litre petrol engine is a three-cylinder destined for production in next year's European Barina.

The transmission uses nearly all the internal parts from Opel's next Astra small car and the suspension components are adapted from a range of late 1990s production models.

Maxx is all about providing a lean, green city machine with enough zip to give cheek in the traffic and enough style for an intelligent audience.

Maxx might bomb in Australia, where car buyers are convinced that size matters, fuel is cheap in world terms and environmental issues are nowhere near as close to the top of the agenda as they are in Germany.

But it's the most refreshing piece of new car thinking in a long time. Phil Scott

In short, the Opel Maxx maxed out its potential as a concept car, never graduating to the production line despite rave reviews from the motoring press and a healthy interest from the general public.

The crunch though, as it almost always is, was money. Could Opel build the Maxx cheaply enough to be able to make a profit? The answer, according Opel’s engineering director at the time, Peter Hanenberger (who would go on to head up General Motors-Holden) was ‘no’, citing safety and cost as the two primary deciding factors.

“To begin with, we have problems with crashworthiness with such a short car,” he told Britain’s The Independent newspaper in 1996. “Our research into vehicles shorter than a [Opel] Corsa (Holden Barina) has found that women with children reject them because they think they are not safe for the kids in the back.

“Then there's price. We have to make a profit, and the Maxx would be expensive to make. For what we'd have to charge, our customers could buy a bigger Corsa.”

It’s important to note that the Opel Maxx, predated the philosophically similar Smart ForTwo by two years (the Smart car was launched in 1998) although Mercedes-Benz had been developing the two-seater city car since 1993.

In what is perhaps a case of what could have been for Opel, over 2.2 million of the diminutive Smart ForTwo have been sold since 1998. Australia, where the ForTwo was available from 2003 to 2015 (initially called the City-Coupe before becoming the ForTwo in 2004) accounted for 3571 of those sales. Australians, it seemed, never really took to what was an utterly sensible, and dare we say it, smart, car for many city dwellers.

Whether a similar offering, albeit one with four seats and sporting a Holden badge on the grille would have made a bigger impact is debateable. Which is a shame, as the Opel – or Holden – Maxx had all the ingredients of a charming and fun city car that was, by all accounts a hoot to drive and frugal on fuel.

The Opel Maxx may not have made it into production but at least part of General Motors’ city car recipe did leave one lasting legacy.

The 973cc three-cylinder engine found under the snub-nosed bonnet of the Maxx, a naturally-aspirated petrol unit developed specifically for Opel’s cute-as-a-button city car, was confirmed for production. Just a year after the Maxx’s motor show debut, the Z10XE became the first modern three-cylinder engine to go into production in Europe, finding a home in the second-generation Opel Corsa. It remains in service to this day. RM

So, what do you think? Would a Holden Maxx have sold well in Australia? Let us know in the comments below.