I just seen an Alfa variant of one of the popular Peugeot (600e?) platforms there... but worse than that... an ALFA VAN... what the ****? Now I know, we've debated whether or not Fiat is dead, or whether this is just more of the same of recent decades in regards to sharing things with other big car makers like the Peugeot vans and the GM Punto stuff... but a Van in the Alfa Romeo lineup? That is surely as un-holy, and against the Italian spirit of everyone to do with the origins of Alfa Romeo, as the 'all electric' Abarth is against the original spirit of Carlos Abarth (although at least they're likely to fix that blunder now with more engines!)
The grill of the new Panda concepts do look very Vauxhall-esque, hopefully they can shake that. I mean looking at some of the very popular Korean stuff, they blatantly stole elements from nearly every mainstream Western brand shamelessly, and people bought it. Now, the CCP crap [much worse] is blatantly copying entire side profiles... entire light clusters and entire front ends from other brands and people are still buying them. So as much as any similarity with that 'Grandland' front makes me sick in my mouth, I'm sure the new Panda will not be phased in the marketplace by it.
One thing I'll say from my week or so with that is... that very flat, very smooth glossy 'visor' front is prime real estate for a bug and insect graveyard, but where any conventional bumper design of modern cars is difficult to clean without a little paintbrush, strong cleaner, and sore knees and ankles from bending down to properly clean it... those hide the real nastiness of the vaporised bugs well. The big shiny flat surface.. not only gets the same coverage, but it looks - much much much - worse and obvious and with a raised up, in your face crossover style, you'd see the black specs, the yellow tinges and the red tinges and mutilation right in your face.
Looking back at the Centoventi, this back end / C pillar 'squared off' original 1980s Panda like shape seems to be something even a fully FCA Panda successor was going to adopt - ditching the quirky back of the 2003 and 2011 models that is sadly missing. So I suppose I can quit blaming Peugeot on that one...