Rob Maetzig

What’s in a name? Everything when it comes to paintwork, as we discover during our first Kiwi drive of the new Holden Astra sedan. files.

One day I’d love to have a go at naming a motor vehicle paint colour. It would be fun, because these days you don’t just call a car red or blue or black. Instead, the colour descriptions are all part of marketing – with the more exotic the description, the better.

General Motors seems good at coming up with interesting paint names. For example, right now you can buy a Holden Commodore painted Son of a Gun Grey, or Light My Fire which is a sort of orange. Or you can order a Colorado ute painted not just red, but Absolute Red.

All this came to mind when Holden New Zealand hosted a few journalists in Auckland to spend a couple of hours behind the wheel of its new Astra sedan, which is arriving on dealership floors about now.

It came to mind because the model I got to drive was painted a very dark blue called Old Blue Eyes.

The hue – and its name – has actually been around for some years now, with General Motors using it on several of its models, particularly those sold in the United States. For many other vehicles in other parts of the world the paint, which is an official GM colour, has gone by the names of Blue Velvet, Dark Sapphire Blue and Dark Adriatic Blue.

But in the US it always seems to have been called Old Blue Eyes, which makes sense because that was the nickname given to the legendary American singer and actor, Frank Sinatra.

Do you know that he was one of the world’s best-selling musicians, selling more than 150 million records? And that when he died in 1998 the lights on the Empire State Building in New York shone blue and roulette wheels in Las Vegas casinos stopped spinning for a minute?

That’s how big Sinatra was. So it does seem appropriate that the wheels keep spinning on his memory – in GM’S case, the wheels of many vehicles painted a hue called Old Blue Eyes.

The new Holden Astra sedan just arrived in New Zealand is actually the Chevrolet Cruze, which was designed and developed in the US. Our version is built in South Korea, and for Australasian use the suspension has been specially tuned so the ride is firmer than the American and European versions. And of