The latest Commodore sedan is almost certain to be the last rear-wheel drive Aussie-built Holden. Glenn Brooks, just back from two weeks in his home city of Sydney, tried the new-ish SSV Redline derivative and was reluctant to give it back.
“I couldn’t tell you the last time I was in a Holden,” exclaimed an old school friend, as he climbed into the Commodore. “It’s not bad, is it?” was his next comment. There, put simply, is the reason why GM Holden has struggled to make a business case for directly replacing the long line of big rear-wheel drive sedans that it has made in one form of other for the last 35 years.
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My buddy has always been a car enthusiast – ironically his dad was once a very successful Holden salesman – and he drives a Discovery, having had European brand cars for as long as I can recall. Why not a Holden? Too much a brand of his parents’ generation, or simply, just not premium enough. Which is sad, as Holden makes and imports excellent cars. OK, maybe not so much the Barina Spark, the little GM Korea-made version of the Chevy Spark isn’t one of my favourite cars but it’s decent enough I suppose.
What would it take to get more middle-class Australians who typically make the equivalent of GBP75,000-100,000 a year buying large V6- and V8-engined locally-build sedans again? That’s the wrong question though. The right one would be, how has Holden managed to keep the Commodore and its derivatives, the Ute (pick-up), SportWagon (you can guess) and Caprice (long-wheelbase luxury sedan) selling relatively well for as long as they have been? What some in the local media often forget to point out, when speculating on when exactly Holden’s Elizabeth plant will supposedly be closed, is the age of the current Zeta platform cars.
Holden launched the current Commodore in 2006 so by rights, it should have been replaced by a new model this year. What Australians call the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), plus the savage cuts to R&D spending ahead of and after the bankruptcy of General Motors combined to see the latest VF series model delayed by roughly two years. The shame is that the car is easily the best Australian-made model yet and had it been launched in, say, 2011, things might have been different for Commodore family vehicles. As it is, sales took a steep dive earlier this year as Holden phased out the old VE-shape car and are only now beginning to recover.
As noted in a recent analysis piece, the Australian market is one of the world’s most competitive so the former number one brand (now number two thanks to Toyota’s domination of the LCV market) really couldn’t afford to slow the new product launch machine, as it did. The Cruze, Holden’s only other locally-made model, sells in decent numbers but it can’t match the imported Corolla or the Mazda3, the latter the top selling vehicle of 2012. And while the Commodore easily outsells the aged Falcon sedan, it has to battle another supposed rival, the Camry and its V6 derivative, the Aurion. In reality, the front-wheel drive Toyotas are smaller, D segment models but are thought of by most buyers as direct rivals to the E-sized Holden and Ford.
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By GlobalDataWhere Toyota Australia continues to trump GM Holden and Ford Australia is in its export successes. Fords sends a small number of Falcon-based Territory SUVs to Thailand each year, but really, its Broadmeadows-built vehicles are sold almost exclusively within Australia (a handful go across the Tasman Sea to the far smaller NZ market).
Holden has tried hard with export programmes, the Pontiac G8 sedan having been an earlier attempt than the new Chevrolet SS at shipping LHD Commodores to the USA. The G8 did OK for a while, but its lifecycle was a mere 18 months due to GM killing the model, along with Pontiac division in mid-2009. The pre-facelift Commodore was also marketed in Brazil as the Chevrolet Omega and some cars are also sent to South Africa for sale as Chevrolets there. But overall, the Commodore is simply too specifically designed for the Aussie market, or rather the way the Aussie market used to be, to have been a major export success. The issue of a too-strong and famously volatile local dollar certainly hasn’t helped matters either.
There has been some good news in recent times, with the VF series, which Holden claimed to be a new model (it’s more accurate to call it a major re-engineering, as multiple body panels are new, as is the interior) when it launched it during the most recent southern hemisphere winter. Sales therefore commenced in June but the VF has been a slow-burner. In October, the car had its best month for business purchases since September 2011, according to the VFACTS data service which monitors national car sales. Including private purchases, a total of 3,315 Commodores were sold last month, a year on year rise of 35%. That shows just how far registrations of the old VE series model had dipped.
Can North America’s new 2014 Chevy SS turn round the Commodore’s fortunes in its last three years of life? Not really; that car is a pricey, low-volume model mostly aimed at selected US states but it could well turn a handy profit for Holden and there are noises about the addition of a wagon body style for the 2015 model year. It had its motor show debut in New York in April, having been revealed at the Daytona 500 two months previously. The SS is entering showrooms right now. Unlike the SSV Redline which Holden lent me to test, the Chevy SS is powered by a 415hp 6.2-litre V8 – the Redline has ‘only’ got a 6.0-litre. Oddly enough, the cars have one main rival in common: the Chrysler 300 SRT8, which sells well down under, though of course US registrations are far higher.
The same basic V8 as the larger-engined Chevy is what makes the SSV version of the Commodore so special to drive. In the UK, we will soon have the Vauxhall VXR8 GTS as a far wilder model, it being a version of the 576bhp supercharged HSV (Holden Special Vehicles) GTS. The Holden SSV Redline produces a far more modest 362bhp (270kW) but it sounds beautiful as you rev it and the redline is a lofty 7,000rpm. The six-speed gearbox is a bit clunky and the clutch got heavy in Sydney’s endless stop-start peak hours traffic but there’s an automatic option. Here’s something which surprised me: there’s no stop-start. Just shows you how that feature is something we now expect to find on all cars up here in Europe.
The Redline comes with what Holden terms its FE3 performance tuned suspension to distinguish it from cheaper versions, plus 10-spoke 19” polished and forged alloy wheels and red-painted Brembo four-piston front brake callipers. It certainly looks the part though thankfully, as some of the edgier suburbs where we ate out in Sin City can be notorious for car crime, the press vehicle’s subtle metallic light green paint ensured a low profile.
The Commodore will be replaced in late 2016 or early 2017, Holden says, but other than the model name being carried over, no other information has been revealed. Logically, a new version of the Holden and Chevrolet Malibu could be the car which succeeds it on the line at the Elizabeth plant in South Australia but I’m not convinced – can Holden really sell and export the necessary 30,000+ units of that model to make local production viable? The cars to be made in the Adelaide suburb should all use the same future D2XX architecture, so that means as well as next year’s new Cruze, possibly also the successor for the Captiva which I hear has been engineered by GM Korea but styled in Melbourne by Holden. A larger D2XX-based sedan and/or wagon would be the supposed next Commodore.
It will be interesting to see just what products do end up being built by GMH to effectively take over from its Sigma Zeta platform vehicles. Here’s a thought: it’s a shame that GM has no premium brand in Australia as just one high-priced D2XX Buick or Cadillac sedan or crossover for the local market and export could in theory transform the viability of Elizabeth.
Whatever vehicle does step in for the current Commodore, it will have to be something extra special to match the roominess, value (my top-spec press car was priced at just under AU$52,000), performance (0-100km/h in 4.9 seconds), and perhaps surprisingly, economy (I saw an average 12l/100km: at the depressingly low legal limit of 70km/h on many motorways the tacho showed just 1,000rpm in sixth) of the SSV Redline.
As a school kid in 1978, I pushed my way into a crowded Holden showroom, as eager as real buyers to see the first Commodore in top-spec SL/E trim (it had headlight wipers – we’d never seen those on an Aussie car!). That started a decades-long admiration for Holden’s multiple generations of big sedans. My 15 and 16 year-old nephews liked the sound of the SSV when I fired up the car at my sister and brother-in-law’s home. But they didn’t ask for a ride. And while my Discovery-driving friend was dropped home impressed by the Commodore’s interior, he didn’t ask me could he have a drive. That saddens me, but perhaps, just as Opel is on its way back with the German public, so too Holden can take the next few years to build its own image anew. When V8-engined Commodores are gone, they will be missed. And let it go on the record that the last in the series was an absolute cracker to drive.
