Remember when Holden vehicles were built here?
Rob Maetzig files a history of General Motors’ assembly operations in New Zealand.
Last Friday when Holden shut down its assembly plant in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth, the closure marked the end of motor vehicle assembly in Australia for good.
For the Australians it was a sad occasion, not only because closure over the last 12 months of the Ford, Toyota and now Holden assembly plants has cost thousands of jobs, but also because it puts an end to a rich Aussie history of car assembly.
Right now it is worth remembering that Holden went through exactly the same thing in New Zealand 27 years ago.
When it shut the doors at its Trentham plant in 1990, it ended 64 years of assembly of General Motors vehicles – during which almost 600,000 vehicles were built.
It all began back in 1926 when General Motors New Zealand Ltd opened a vehicle assembly plant in Petone.
Right from the outset it began producing a wide range of North American-sourced vehicles – the first car off the line was a four cylinder Chevrolet sedan.
That factory, which initially had close to 250 employees, produced more than 1000 Chevrolets in its first eight months of operation.
By 1928 it had added Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile to the list of vehicles being built there, and staff had grown to 500.
In 1929 the Petone plant built its12,000th GM vehicle, and just over a year later British Vauxhall cars and Bedford trucks began to be assembled, the first such vehicle a Vauxhall VX sedan.
By 1936 more than 37,000 vehicles had been assembled at Petone, and the plant was still growing – by 1939 it had doubled in floor space and employed 760 staff.
But then World War II was declared, and the factory was converted to munitions production.
Various products including more than 1000 bren-gun carriers were built there.
Close to 1000 war-damaged army trucks were also reconditioned by the GM Petone staff so they could be returned to service.
After the war ended, import restrictions meant that it wasn’t until early 1947 that the first postwar GM car – a Chevrolet – rolled off the assembly line.
But business picked up from there as the New Zealand economy recovered, and by 1952 the 100,000th vehicle had been built.
Two years later New Zealand was introduced to a new GM brand - Holden.
Holden cars began to be exported from Australia to New Zealand as fully built-up cars, but a few years later they began to be assembled at Petone - the first such car, an FE series sedan, rolled off the line on January 31 1957.
At the same time the UKsourced Vauxhall Victor was introduced, replacing the Wyvern, Velox and Cresta models. And a year later the big Chevrolet Bel Air began to be assembled.
Ten years later GMNZ opened a second vehicle assembly plant at Trentham, where it built such vehicles as the Holden HQ series, the Vauxhall Viva, and from 1979, the Commodore.
That car instantly became one of New Zealand’s most popular vehicles, consistently among the top-three sellers for a number of years.
As New Zealand moved into the 1980s, motor vehicle preferences began to shift towards Japanese product, and as a result demand for British vehicles began to wane.
GMNZ responded by closing the Petone plant in 1984 – the last vehicle to be produced there was a Bedford van – and all production was centred at Trentham.
Five years later assembly of the Holden Camira and Barina stopped, leaving just the Commodore to be built there.
Then, following introduction of the Government’s plan to gradually phase out import duties on imported cars, the decision was made to close that plant as well and import the Commodores in fully built-up form from Australia.
The last Commodore to be built in New Zealand was a V6-engined VN, which rolled off the line on November 21, 1990.
It took total production of GM vehicles from both Petone and Trentham to 593,945.
In 1994 General Motors New Zealand changed its name to Holden New Zealand, and five years later it shifted its head office to Auckland – thus ending a decades-long industrial relationship with Wellington’s Hutt Valley.
And now, the Australian assembly of Commodores has finished as well.
From early next year the model will be replaced by Commodores imported from Europe.
They’re actually Opels – which is what the original Commodores were anyway when they were first introduced close to four decades ago.
It could be said that when the new Commodore is introduced, it won’t be a real Aussie Commodore.
But in 1990 the same could have been said in New Zealand – that the imported Commodores weren’t real Kiwi ones.
It just goes to show that in the history of the motor vehicles, things have always moved in circles.