Archive for Lancia

A television ad that Lancia produced for its new Delta hatchback has angered China as it touched on the sensitive issue on Tibet’s attempts to gain independence from China.

The commercial shows actor Richard Gere driving the Lancia Delta in a Tibetan village where he makes a hand print in the snow with a young Tibetan monk. Richard Gere has been well known to speak out publicly against China’s Tibet policies. The ad ends with the message “The power to be different”… a hidden (or not so hidden) message about Tibet not wanting to be a part of China? Delta is also the symbol of “difference” in maths.

Fiat has issued an apology to the People’s Republic of China over an misinterpretations of its position of neutrality and said that the use of Richard Gere in the ad does not mean Fiat endorsed his political views, however a top Fiat official said the ad was “politically advanced” and since Lancia did not sell cars in China, it was free to comment on the whole Tibet-China issue.

Unfortunately Fiat does sells cars in China, albeit that is another hairy situation as it does not actually have any cars to sell now, still being in a transition period from its partnership with Nanjing to its new partnership with Chery.

View the “offending” ad after the jump.

Click here to read the rest of Lancia Delta “Richard Gere” TV Commercial

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Sometime in May this year Fiat announced that it would revive the Topolino name for a range of small cars that could potentially also include one that has electric drive, as the Fiat Phylla concept hinted. The new Fiat Topolino variants will be built at the recently acquired Zastava plant in Serbia. Above is an artist’s impression of what the new Fiat Topolino could look like. The Lancia-like grille is similiar to the grille that the classic original Fiat Topolino had, and would not be totally off as Fiat intends to market an upmarket version of the Topolino as a Lancia.

The new Lancia Delta will be unveiled at the 2008 Geneva auto show and it will be the first Lancia to be launched since the Lancia Musa minivan in 2004. It will go on sale in 2010. Lancia intends to sell 70,000 Lancia Deltas annually, with 50% of that in Lancia’s homeland of Italy. It will be produced in the Cassino plant, along with the Fiat Bravo and Croma models. Both right hand drive and left hand drive models will be produced.

We first saw signs of the new Delta in the Delta HPE Concept shown before, and this production version has softer lines but still generally looks like the concept. From photos especially the side profile you can see it looks very much like a Fiat Bravo, and in reality the Delta is in fact based on a stretched Fiat Bravo platform, which is 100mm longer at 2700mm. The car is 4500mm long, 1800mm wide and 1500mm tall.

The interior also is obviously a restyling of the Bravo’s interior. You get a Bose Hi-Fi radio incorporating a CD player and MP3 file reader with steering-wheel mounted controls, and of course the Blue & Me in-car entertainment controls developed with Microsoft that was also in the Bravo.

The Lancia Delta will come with a range of turbocharged engines producing power outputs ranging from 120 horsepower up to 200 horsepower, and these engines are mix-matched to a range of manual, automatic and computer-controlled clutch manuals.

More photos after the jump.

Related Posts:
Lancia Delta HPE Concept
Fiat Bravo GT 1.4 T-JET 150hp Short Test Drive

Click here to read the rest of New Lancia Delta: first new model since 2004

So you’ve seen a go-kart going out of it’s territory and entering the car’s playground - the empty highways of Quebec City in Canada. The cars have decided to twist this irony around the other way - after the jump you will find a video of a Lancia Delta S4 having some fun in a little go-kart track. Look at the way that little hatch changes directions!

The Lancia Delta S4 was a WRC car similiar to the Peugeot 405 T16 you saw in an earlier video. It had a 1.8 liter engine that used both supercharging and turbocharging, not unlike Volkswagen’s new award-winning 1.4 liter TSI engine. Output was more than 550 horses with minimal turbo lag thanks to dual forced induction.

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This is the new Lancia Delta HPE Concept, which will be shown to the public at the Paris Motor Show, with a production version to roll off the lines sometime in 2008. The Lancia Delta HPE Concept is 4.5 meters long, 1.8 meters wide and 1.5 meters high, with a wheelbase of 2.7 meters. Trunk capacity is about 400 liters, which is not too bad. The Honda City has a 500 liter trunk while the Audi A4 has a 460 liter trunk.

The Lancia Delta HPE will be based on the new Fiat Bravo platform, and it’s expected that the car will come with a few engine options - 1.4 turbo with either 120PS or 150PS, a 1.8 turbo with 190PS, and two turbodiesels, a 1.6 oil burner with 120PS and a bigger 2.0 oil burner with 165PS.

The original Lancia Delta was a hatchback that was pretty successful, and it had a performance model called the Lancia Delta HF Integrale, fully geared up with a turbocharged engine and an AWD drivetrain. Some of you might be foreign to the name Lancia, an Italian automobile manufacturer which is somewhat less well known than it’s other Fiat Group siblings - Fiat, and Alfa Romeo. However, Lancia has clocked up the most WRC manufacturer’s championship victories so far in the history of the race. Lancia’s rally-equipped Delta HF Integrale was the car responsible for dominating the World Rally Championship, scoring 46 WRC victories overall and winning the Constructors Championship six times in a row from 1987 to 1992, a record.

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