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Opel unveiled a new identity in December 2020, Design Week reported. The German carmaker, owned by General Motors until its 2017 sale to PSA Group, the owner of Peugeot, Citroën and Vauxhall, said the rebrand was confident, young-minded and inclusive, drawing on what its marketing director called progressive, 'cold to cool' modern German culture. The work was a collaboration between Opel and a McCann-run agency that already handled Vauxhall's marketing.

The bevelled logo became flat. The Opel Blitz, German for lightning, had first appeared in this form on the electric concept car Opel GT X Experimental. Opel said it was more finely drawn, with a thinner ring around the bolt, and the wordmark was redrawn. The company said the aim was to drop frills and distracting elements to reflect a precise German design philosophy, bold and pure. The new logo was already in use in communications and was due on models including the Crossland and Mokka from spring 2021.

Colour carries the electric story. The bright neon yellow used inside and outside the GT X concept now extends across the identity. Opel said it stands for electricity as the new fuel of the electric age, and that the colour electrifies, imprints itself and creates an unmistakeable identity. Monotype designed Opel Next, a typeface in light, regular and bold.

Design Week placed it in a long line of car brands going flat, after Volkswagen, BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Rolls-Royce, driven by digital use and electrification. One reader dismissed it as simply making the logo flat for digital.

Opel's July release, when the Mokka became the first car to wear the redrawn Blitz, gave the design chief's description: a slimmer ring, details with very small radii, and the Opel name set into the lower part of the ring like an engraving on jewellery. The flash in a circle had been on every Opel since 1963, codified in 1970, revised in 1987, made three dimensional in the 2000s and sculpted in chrome from 2016. The 2020 version closes a gap the company itself had opened in 2017, when the corporate logo went flat while the badge on the cars did not. Automotive News framed the result as an update for the digital age.

That is unfair to the yellow, which is the boldest move here and genuinely ownable in a sector of chrome and black. The flat Blitz itself is fine and forgettable, as most of this wave was. Opel's best brand asset is now a colour, not a logo.