NEW LANCIA DELTA: FIRST NEW MODEL SINCE 2004

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.

source: paultan.org