The new Commodore was to have been built in Australia

Way back when the VF Commodore was unveiled in early 2013, then-holden chairman Mike Devereux dropped the bombshell that the nextgeneration version was already on the drawing board and slated for local production from late2016. That was just 10 months before General Motors announced it would pull the plug on Aussie manufacturing.

Holden only recently confirmed that the car in question was going to be a derivative of the Opel Insignia-based ZB.

“There was a view to manufacturing [the new Commodore] in Australia when we started looking at it,” stated one senior Holden source. So the front-wheel-drive Commodore was inevitable, regardless of where it was to be made.