Germany's Polizei are wishing they could cancel their $32.8 million order (25 million Euros) of new Opel Insignias (read: Buick Regals) because they can't fit into their seats. Have the cops been laying too heavily into the Brühwurst?
It's not actually that the officers are too fat. It's just that with their guns, batons, cell phones, pepper spray, and handcuffs, the police officers won't fit into the seats designed for unencumbered humans. Of equal importance, the officers complain that they can't see out of the new cars.
"I need to see out of the back every minute, every second," said the police's union deputy chairman Lothar Hölzgen. "That's a safety matter for us."
What's more, the police in the state of Hesse (where this guy was from) have only received a quarter of their allotted vehicles. They signed a deal with Opel in 2010 for 800 of these "Sports Tourers."
The state's interior minister declared yesterday that the police will have to keep these new cars, even if they can't fit into them. Opel's headquarters are in the state of Hesse, so this kind of blind support is unsurprising.
So the Opel's interior is poorly packaged and inefficient, and the high doors and narrow windows make it dangerously difficult to see out of. Wait, did the German police just describe everything wrong with new car design?
Photo Credit: Opel