The is back! This particular Manta has now as a neon EV restomod in a teaser that is all too brief and yet rife with the Manta we covet. Importantly, it ditches the blue stripe of eco cars.

Opel let us glimpse the restomod, which it calls the :

I’ll get this out of the way first: Opel is not going to be pushing this into production, sadly. Also, the name sucks. It’s too long and Opel is stylizing it too much.

Opel Manta GSe is fine so the word ElektroMOD seems vestigial. I understand the reference Opel wants. It’s making a connection between this EV and the but I’m of the mind that the Manta GSe doesn’t need more piled on.

Clunky name aside, the restomod looks great! It takes a beloved model and speeds the machine to the current car age. We only get a view of the Manta EV from a top-down perspective for now but Opel dropped clues elsewhere.

The carmaker had already drawn inspiration from the original Manta with its . In that you can see a little of the transformation from the Manta front end to that which Opel claimed its EVs would feature. And Opel delivered. It calls the front end the , a node of sensors and lights that pull double duty as status indicators, according to Opel’s following :

...the Opel Vizor is a full, single module that houses and frames all of the high-tech and brand elements such as the cameras and sensors of the assistance systems and autonomous driving functions, the latest in LED matrix headlight technology, the wing-shaped daytime running lights and the LED Blitz emblem that shows the car’s operation state by lighting up in different colours under darkly tinted Plexiglass.

The Manta GSe seems like it’s wearing the Opel Vizor front end. Also, I love that Opel officially refers to its logo as the blitz. I’ve and I’ll keep saying it: Opel has the best logo for the our imminent EV transition.

Best of all, though, the Manta GSe has no blue EV accents to speak of. Well, at least not in the scant images the German carmaker provided so far. But here’s hoping this restomod is all-in on neon green.

I don’t know why the EV blue color accent idea caught on, and I’m unsure where that concept originated from. I know Toyota has blue color filigree for the and the featured streaks of blue to show off its EV status but carmakers took it too far. Carmakers assumed the only thing EVs needed was a blue badge or splashes of blue in nondescript places. It’s just silly and done way too often.

An EV may be electric but it’s still a vehicle. It’s a damn car. Let it have its own color palette without shoehorning blue accents everywhere. Opel seems to get it. The Manta GSe is choosing neon green to assault our rods and cones like cars of the late 60s and early 70s once did. This is a throwback EV that knows what it wants to be.