The Carchive: The Lancia Dedra

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It’s time once more to listen to the waves of history as they wash lazily over the sands of time. On the shoreline of the island of memories can be found The Carchive, packed to critical mass with brochures and publicity materials for hundreds of unforgettable vehicles. And others besides.

Today’s offering is from the “others besides” section. On Monday’s wholly accurate episode we visited France for the Citroen Visa. Today we head further South East. Italy, in fact, and the Lancia Dedra.

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“A prestigious new saloon that combines the best features of traditional Lancia design”

Well, I don’t know what Dedra means but I’d dread to make an anagram of it. Dedra was not really a name that meant a lot to most people, and indeed, by 1989 in England, not a great many people had much of a clue what Lancia meant either.

Although the upmarket Italian marque had enjoyed an uninterrupted UK presence for dozens of years, they had become somewhat reputationally scarred by the disaster that was the UK launch of the Beta family in the ’70s. You could buy a brand new Beta one day, go home, park on the driveway and go inside for bed, only to wake up the next day and open your front door to see a driveway with no Lancia Beta but instead a pile of browny orange dust (or sludge if it was raining, which it inevitably was) and four Pirellis. Such was the extent of the problem with premature corrosion of subframes and things that Lancia UK bought back dozens of customers cars, had them spirited away and “dealt with”.

Very soon Lancia publicity materials would spend the first several pages bleating on about zinc-galvanisation, PVC and wax injection into body cavities and six-year anti-corrosion warranties. All very worthy and genuine, but not really enough to renew the interest of the public. The Dedra was never destined to be a big seller over here.

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“A luxurious and prestigious alternative for those looking for a value for money saloon”

It was also cursed by a peculiar phenomenon that has long shaped the UK car-buying landscape. A compact hatchback, like the Golf, will sell very well. However, give it a separate trunk like the Jetta and it suddenly becomes a poor relation. Somehow adding a boot onto such a car robs it of all youthful joie-de-vivre and lends it a pensionerly, fuddy-duddy appeal. The Peugeot 306, sharp and pert, suddenly became an ugly sloth with a box on the back. The Lancia Delta had always been a classy little number, but the Prisma, the sedan variant, was never the wheels of choice for the go-getter around town. And here now was the Dedra, taking over from the Prisma, and held back by that damn silly name.

“…Provides the true Gran Turismo character for which Lancia is renowned”

It really wasn’t a bad car at all. The underpinnings were very good indeed, being based on the Type Three family structure which first appeared under the Fiat Tipo, a car which was roundly celebrated for the way it went down the road. It was clearly a very worthy setup, deemed good enough to be used for Chris Bangle’s masterpiece, the Fiat Coupe.

Yet, somehow, contemporary road tests bemoaned the fact that the sharpness and tactility of the Tipo was somehow watered down in the Dedra. “…occasionally agile, but inert steering dulls the handling when pressing on” was how Autocar saw it in 1991. And that was the 2000 Turbo, the UK range flagship.

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“In every respect, the Lancia Dedra Turbo is the complete driver’s car”

A 165hp turbocharged engine, 134mph top end and 7.2 second 0-60 (if Performance Car magazine were to be believed) would tend to suggest that Lancia were right. But then, the press findings of un-magical handling and a peculiar driving position that meant that non-Latins didn’t really fit inside, rather worked against its favour. And, as far as I know, we never got the really interesting version. Yes, there was a Dedra Integrale, sharing the hatchback Delta’s permanent four-wheel-drive system as well as its brawny turbo-four.

It was the Delta Integrale that did the most for Lancia’s image in the UK, and the Delta was the last model from the firm to be dropped. By 1995 Lancia had disappeared from this country, partially because the meagre residual values of their cars made for an unsustainable business model, and partly because we just didn’t say very many nice things about them.

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It’s all a bit of a shame. The Dedra did something that nobody else really offered; with its polished rosewood dashboards and high equipment level, it was a compact car tailored specifically for luxury compared to Fiat’s value image and Alfa Romeo’s overtly sporting demeanor. There was talk about a brand renaissance in 2008, but that was abandoned due to global economic wobbliness. But we were at least treated to the Lancia Delta and Ypsilon with Chrysler badges on them. Bleh.

But surely things will change for the better soon….. surely?

(Disclaimer: All images are of original manufacturer publicity materials, photographed by me. Copyright remains property of Fiat Group SPA, who have something exciting, world-beating and droolworthy just waiting in the wings, I assure you)

 

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