END OF THE LINE
A look at the last Holdens to come off the production line at the Elizabeth assembly plant
IT’S DIFFICULT to believe it’s come to this. Our once-proud industrial nation now no longer makes cars. We’ve been doing it, all by ourselves, for almost 70 years, since Holden dropped the sheets on what was announced as ‘Australia’s Own Car’, the 48-215 Holden sedan, in November 1948. Before that, Australia assembled kits of cars – Ford began doing that in Geelong pretty much with its Model T – and put locally built bodies on imported chassis.
For around half that time we’ve been exporting our Aussie-made cars to other countries, too. Holden and Toyota, especially, sent tens of thousands of cars overseas each year.
But on 20 October 2017, when the last bright red Holden Commodore SS-V Redline was driven from the end of Holden’s vehicle assembly plant in Elizabeth, South Australia, it all came to an end.
There are a stack of reasons why Australia has killed its manufacturing – and here is not the place to analyse it. But many street machiners won’t be old enough to know – or have had the desire to discover – that brands as diverse as Volkswagen, Mercedes, Renault, Jeep, British Leyland, Peugeot and AMC have all assembled, built or designed cars here. Sure, some of them were little more than kit-car assembly operations in suburban warehouses, but Australia was mega-manufacturer Toyota’s first export market and also the first place it chose to create a factory outside of Japan. It’s a tragedy for our national pride that it’s also the first Toyota fullscale manufacturing facility ever to be shut down.
But back to Holden. In the past Holden had production facilities scattered across the country – Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne. It really wasn’t a smart way to do business – especially when some models were welded, painted and trimmed in one