Unlike the underpinnings that the Opel / Vauxhall team had planned to use (which would have required a licence fee payable to previous owners General Motors for every car built if PSA had used it), this chassis could support four cylinder engines and full-electrification. By that point, development on an all-new MK5 Corsa was almost complete and prototypes were pounding the roads around Russelsheim, but the PSA board ordered that the project should be scrapped and begun again using their more flexible CMP small car platform.
There was a reason of course for this impasse and it lay with the French PSA Group's £1.9 billion purchase of the Opel and Vauxhall brands back in March 2017. But, as that little history lesson makes clear, by 2019 it had been an awful long time since we'd seen a completely fresh from the ground-up version of this Vauxhall. Here, this supermini is almost as much as a supermini institution as its closest rival, the Ford Fiesta and it's still by far the Griffin maker's best selling model, shifting over twice as many units as anything else the company makes. By that point, over 13.5 million Corsas had been sold in Europe, with 2.1 million of those badged as Vauxhalls for the UK market. That car was only lightly re-skinned to create this model's predecessor, the Corsa E of 2014, a fourth generation model that had to carry on well past its sell-by date before it was replaced in Autumn 2019 by the MK5 Corsa F model we look at here. Our market first met the Corsa in 1993, that 'B' model replaced by a Corsa C contender in 2000, before a complete re-design for the Corsa D of 2006. The name plate here dates back to the Corsa A model of 1982 (badged as a Vauxhall Nova in the UK). All stuff that Vauxhall tried to sort in this fifth generation version. Vauxhall's Corsa has always been a well-priced, practical supermini, but in its first four generations, it was usually let down by distinctively average engines, a bit of a weight problem, less than cutting-edge technology and the lack of the kind of spark that would endear you to the thing. As a result, on paper at least, it's the most competitive supermini the brand has ever brought us. This fifth generation version aims to surprise in all the ways its predecessors were unremarkable. Time, perhaps, to change the way you feel about Vauxhall's Corsa.
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