Monza to set tone for next Buick Regal

PARIS — The next-generation Opel Insignia — which will be rebadged as the next Buick Regal sedan for the U.S. market — will be more premium and take styling cues from the lithe Monza concept car that Opel revealed in 2013.

“You will see the Monza when you see the next Insignia,” Opel CEO Karl-Thomas Neumann said on the sidelines of the auto show here this week.

Opel showed the Monza at the Frankfurt auto show in September 2013. The four-seat coupe, which resurrects an Opel name from the 1970s and ’80s, has a flowing, greyhound-like shape, fastback silhouette and prominent rear-wheel arches.

General Motors won’t say when the future Insignia is due. It will arrive before the Regal is launched in the U.S., which sources have said will be sometime in 2017.

Mark Adams, Opel’s head designer, is leading the design effort for the Insignia, and is the point person on GM’s strategy to more closely align the Opel and Buick brands. On the current Insignia, which got a facelift last year, Adams said Opel added “premium brand values” to the car in a bid to “add polish to the brand.”

“As we do this future replacement,” he said of the next-gen Insignia, “it has to polish even harder.”