1971 Opel GT

Like a surprising number of industrial companies, German automaker Opel got its start as a sewing machine manufacturer in the mid-19th Century. They branched out into bicycle-making and produced their first motorcar in 1899.

After they went public in the late 1920s, General Motors acquired a majority stake and they became entirely owned by GM in 1931.

GM never set up Opel as a freestanding brand of its own in the U.S. market, but over the years they rebadged some, and sold a couple others as Opels through other GM dealerships.

Probably the best known of the latter is the Opel GT, made from 1968 through 1973 and sold in the U.S. alongside hulking Centurions and Electras on Buick lots in the waning days of the Muscle Car Era.

Looking almost like a five-eighths scale C3 Corvette, the GT is a steel unibody car with transverse leaf spring front suspension and a live rear axle.

The Jade Green car in the photos is a 1971 model. For 1971, compression on the 116 cubic inch "cam-in-head*" four cylinder was dropped from 9.5:1 to 7.6:1, which dropped horsepower from 102 to 90 bhp.

The car was still reasonably perky by virtue of a slick-shifting 4-speed and a curb weight right around two thousand pounds. Road & Track recorded a 0-60 time of 10.8 seconds from the earlier 102hp 1970 model, which was spritely for a little 4-cylinder hardtop GT at the time. It'd certainly kick sand in the face of the Karmann Ghia or the 1.8L MGB GT. The quarter took 17.7 seconds at 77mph, and the motor kept pulling up to 113 miles per hour.

While it was being sold on Buick lots next to GS 455's, those weren't its real competition. Instead, it was discontinued rather than undergoing the redesign it would take to compete with cars like the 2.0L Celica and the new 240Z from Datsun.

The one in the photos was snapped in October of 2023 with a Nikon D800 and 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom lens.

*Opel's cam-in-head motor wasn't a true OHC engine, instead it was an OHV motor that had a camshaft in the cylinder head operating the valves via short tappets and rocker arms, rather than longer pushrods running up from a cam low in the block.