The first car we had when I was a kid was a 1936 Opel Kadett. After WWII ordinary people couldn’t buy new cars in Norway until 1961 and you were lucky if you could get hold of an old one. My dad took that old Opel apart, we had the engine and gearbox on our kitchen table for weeks while he cleaned it and replaced broken parts. Then he fixed the rust, put in a new wooden floor and we had the first working car on our street.
It used to overheat every now and then. If it did, my mum, my sister and I would take a stroll down the road, it was safer then, not that many cars. When old Adam ,as we called the car, had cooled down my dad came and picked us up and we carried on to where ever we were going – Ted
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia
The first Opel car to carry the Kadett name was presented to the public in December 1936 by Opel’s Commercial-Technical director, Heinrich Nordhoff, who would in later decades become known for his leadership role in building up the Volkswagen company.
The new Kadett followed the innovative Opel Olympia in adopting a chassis-less monocoque construction, suggesting that like the Vauxhall 10 introduced in 1937 by Opel’s English sister-company, the Opel Kadett was designed for high volume low cost production. Competitive pricing led to commercial success, and Kadetts continued to be produced during the early months of the war: by the time production was interrupted in 1940 following intensification of hostilities, 107,608 of these Opel Kadetts had come off the assembly line at Opel’s Rüsselsheim plant, which had been the first major car plant in Germany to apply the assembly-line production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford.
After the war, Opel production facilities from Brandenburg an der Havel (trucks) were crated up and transported to the Soviet Union as part of a larger reparations package agreed upon by the victorious powers. From 1948 the prewar Kadett was manufactured as the Moskvitch 400/420: it continued to be produced on the edge of Moscow as a Moskvitch until 1956.
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