Thread: Holden - how long before the end?

Face it, folks. Holden is now just a badge. At least Ford had the decency to retire the Falcon name. Holden gives us this hyperbole:

Explore the All-New Holden Commodore Range. Discover the Next Generation Of Our Most Iconic Car.

Holden Commodore 2018 Range | Holden Australia


They have to be joking. And a sick joke at that

Yes the new Commodore is no longer even a GM product - is a peugeot product with the takeover of Opel last year. Yes it was designed and built as a GM product but at the time it went on sale no ownership links remain with GM.

Originally Posted by Homestar

Toyota was viable until Holden and Ford shut up shop - the only reason Toyota closed was because the component manufacturers couldn’t stay competitive with only one player and it’s too expensive to bring stuff in from OS to support the factory. Toyota had a large export market and would have continued on had it not been for the other 2.

Yes which makes all the other so called excuses total bull****, Toyota could make it work but the other two couldnt.
Holden was just a blatant theft from Australian tax payers (personal opinion) and produced nothing but unreliable ****box cars. The latest Holden 4x4 is slapped together in Mexico.

And as already mentioned, this is what happens when you have contempt for customers and Australians. Holden GM dont let the door slap you in the arse on the way out.

Originally Posted by johntins

Face it, folks. Holden is now just a badge. At least Ford had the decency to retire the Falcon name. Holden gives us this hyperbole:

Explore the All-New Holden Commodore Range. Discover the Next Generation Of Our Most Iconic Car.

Holden Commodore 2018 Range | Holden Australia


They have to be joking. And a sick joke at that

And prob not long till that badge goes too.

I hear you, I find it a joke with the way it is being advertised.

Originally Posted by garrycol

The only commonality between the Explorer and D3 was the 4.0 V6 engine.

Not going to get into an argument over this but the same team worked on both chassis. It was co-developed and Ford led as the overall owners with both variants branching off a common still-born project. I sat opposite one of the senior members of that team for the last few years. LR were essentially forced to use it (platform sharing) and had to find other ways to acheive their own internal performance criterea. Like developing a unitary body to sit ontop of it and stiffen it. Mind you, they also 'tweaked' it as much as they could and a casual visual inspection does not really highlight the inherent similarities from an architecture perspective.

History tells us that the Discovery 3/4 is a gem that was the best modern 4WD anywhere and spun off other successful variants and lived well beyond it's projected lifetime... where the Explorer was just another in the crowd and short-lived. Shows what you can do even when dealt a poor hand, with the other tied behind your back. Kudos to LR. What a legacy they created and how they moved the benchmark.

Originally Posted by pauloarg

And prob not long till that badge goes too.

I hear you, I find it a joke with the way it is being advertised.

It's a bugger, getting old. I remember when Ford vs Holden actually meant something here. I once had a girlfriend who had an L34 Torana. Her qualities needed to be special, because I was a Ford man. Once, at Calder, I was amongst a group who pushed Moffat's incredible Mustang out of it's little pit tent ( have a look at the pits these days, and remember Moffat, Brock etc are legends to these silhouette racers. They have no idea ) because he had no reverse. Those guys were heroes. Moff, Beechey, Jane, Geogheon ( all of them ) Bond, Brock. There has been nothing since. The racing has become homogonised. So have the cars.

I have never watched the so called SuperCars. Why would I? Same with F1. What you see now is tripe. If you don't believe me, look at this:





There is no one in the list atm who compares. Not even close. With the rules these days we will never find out.

You cannot compare apples with lemons, I know.

This bloke, however, might have given him a shake as the greatest ever of the modern era:



There isn't a driver in the paddock that can hold a candle to either of them, and in the current climate there never will be. That is why I no longer care about motor racing. It just isn't, anymore. OH&S gets in the way, always.

I linked to F1 because the message is the same, and the vids are MUCH easier to find. The principle is identical.

Holden vs Ford was born in racing. I know. I was there and I watched. At Calder, at Sandown, at Warwick Farm, and especially at Bathurst. Unless you are over 50 you have NFI.

Tombie talks of V8s. Sure. He's right. Sort of. What WE wanted was the V8 that was in the car that MofBrockBond had. It was the same thing as CountDown, where we could play the songs that were the top in the UK, only we couldn't play them if the original artists were involved ( look it up ). What the Australian Touring Car series gave us was local racing that was every bit as good as what you would have seen anywhere for the class. The difference with the racing was, we did it better than them. Moffat had a fair bit to do with that. He worked tirelessly to attract sponsorship. It's a pity that it took a Canadian to put us on the map, but Moff has always been a 'polarising' figure.

The end of car production in Australia - what went wrong | Autocar

There's a bit of "Hoo Ha" developing in this thread.
The above is an article which sums up the situation pretty well I think. Someone made a comment about the Camry, you will note that over the last 20 yrs, 7 out of 10 Camrys were EXPORTED, something that Ford & Holden could not do,....as I've said before,...and as I've also said, were NOTHING to do with any Aussie decision making. If we could've got our exports going, Ford & Holden Aus would be in amuch different situation now. Toyota had exported 1.3M cars by the time the factory closed.
Anyway, I ain't gonna ramble on, just read the link, I reckon it's a good, and fairly accurate read.
Pickles.

Yes, Toyota showed that cars could be made here mainly for export, but Ford and GM failed.