Commodore

The end came for Commodore in December of last year – although for many Holden fans it was over when the last VFII SS-V Redline rolled off the production line in 2017. AMC reflects on the beginnings and the unfortunate end of an Aussie icon.

It’s official, the Holden Commodore is no more. AMC re ects on the unusual origins of this Aussie icon and laments what turned out to be a sad and agonisingly slow death

It wasn’t as though the news came as a shock. For many months, the signs have been pointing towards Holden making the decision to kill off the Commodore brand name. That it was simply a matter of when, not if. And yet… it did come as a shock. After all, the Holden Commodore has been a familiar presence on Australian roads for more than 40 years. Even for those without the slightest interest in cars, the ubiquitous Commodore is at the very least ours. It’s an Aussie icon, maybe not quite as cherished as Vegemite, but the humble Holden Commodore is quintessentially Australian.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but Holden really should have parked the Commodore name when the final VFII sedan rolled off the line in October, 2017. The company could have turned it into a respectful burial for a model name that actually means a lot to a lot of people. That would have been preferable to the unedifying (and probably inevitable) end that saw the Commodore name stagger on, attached to a new and very different range of mid-sized imported sedans and wagons.

Any Holden fan will tell you that that final red, six-speed manual SS-V Redline was the last real Commodore. The ZB might have been a pretty decent car, but it was not rear-wheel drive, was not available as a V8, and it was not made here.

On the other hand, you can’t really blame the decision makers at Holden. They were in a kind of no-win situation. Had they opted for a fresh nameplate for ZB, and then sales tanked, they’d have been savaged for not having the courage to call it a Commodore. Whether it was a Commodore or an Insignia, the ZB was always going to be up against it. The badge read Commodore but the car did not meet the requirements and expectations of traditional Commodore buyers, while in the mid-sized marketplace it was an unknown quantity facing proven performers like Toyota Camry and Mazda6. The Commodore name wasn’t the only thing Holden killed off at the end of last year. Almost unnoticed, the BK Astra model was also discontinued. While few tears will have been shed over that, the Astra’s axing was important because it means that from now on Holden’s model range, to quote Holden’s press release, will be ‘dedicated exclusively to SUVs and light commercial vehicles.’

With the end of the Holden Commodore,

then, has also come the end of the conventional Holden sedan.

It’s a reminder of how much and how quickly the Australian automotive market has changed. And how difficult it is these days for any manufacturer to offer any kind of range of conventional sedans, when the majority of cars sold today aren’t actually cars – they’re SUVs and dual-cab utes.

Of the top 20 sellers in 2019, only six were cars in the conventional sense of the word. And the Commodore wasn’t one of them. In a year in which Holden’s market share plunged almost 30 percent, market leader Toyota sold more Hi-Lux utes than Holden’s total vehicles sales tally!

Today’s domestic car market is almost unrecognisable from that of even just 10 years ago. In 2009 the top selling model was the Commodore VE (and like the Hi-Lux last year, in ’09 Holden sold more Commodores than it did in total in 2019).

In 2009 Holden was the second biggest seller, albeit a fair way behind Toyota. Today it’s a distant 10th. To put that in historical perspective, from the time the first 48-215 model went on sale until 2014 – a total of 66 years – Holden was either the second highest or the top seller. Last year’s sales total of 43,176 represented Holden’s lowest annual sales tally since 1954!

Those are astounding figures. If Holden’s current sales trajectory continues, it may well be that Commodore will soon be followed into oblivion by another iconic Australian name.

Not the Kingswood!

How the Commodore name came to be chosen for Holden’s new ‘V-car’ in 1978 was a kind of accident of history. It was also a long time coming: as late as early 1977 Holden still had no idea what it was going to call the new model. In March that year Holden commissioned behavioural researcher Hugh McKay to test a series of potential names with a sample group from the public. Those names included Kingswood II, Commodore, Torana, Cutlass, Senator and Delta, and others. Commodore didn’t top the list but it was among the more favoured.

Logically the VB should have been a Kingswood (or Kingswood II). After all, it was the existing Kingswood that the V-car was meant to be replacing. And Kingswood was a nameplate with real cache: even though it was barely 10 years old, the Kingswood name had become synonymous with reliable, inexpensive

Aussie-made family transportation. It was already so firmly entrenched in the Australian cultural landscape that it was the subject of a Channel Seven TV comedy series, ‘Kingswood Country.’

But during the development of the V-car Holden began having second thoughts about dropping the Kingswood. By late 1975 the VB Commodore had been clay modelled in was more or less its final form. The model was shown off at a market research clinic as an unbadged prototype. Invited members of the public were asked to appraise the car and compare with it existing models also on display. The overwhelming message was that the prototype looked great, but was too small.

Subsequent clinics produced the same results – the public preferred a larger, Kingswood or Falcon-sized car. This was unwelcome news for Holden, because it was too late to change tack; they were locked into the V-car. The only way out was to hedge their bets. When the new car went on sale, Holden would continue to offer the Kingswood, so long as there was demand for it. So the V-car couldn’t be a Kingswood (and nor could it have taken the Torana name, because Holden opted to continue the existing Torana by releasing the UC model only about six months out from the VB’s release).

It may well be that the Commodore name was chosen simply for want of anything better. In any case, Commodore was how Holden’s development engineers were already referring to it – which was logical, given Opel’s own version of the car was set to be released as the German marque’s new model Commodore ‘C,’ replacing the previous Commodore B.

Off the Rekord

In the Holden Commodore’s 41 years, only once has the next new model generation not been larger than its replacement (the exception being the ZB).

Size, or lack of it, was probably biggest drawback of the original VB series shape. And yet had the original plan been put into action, the first Holden Commodore might have been smaller still. When the project began, the initial plan was for a Holden based on the new Opel Rekord model. But the Rekord was primarily a four-cylinder car. When Holden

engineers had a close look at what Opel was proposing with the new model Rekord they quickly realised it wasn’t going to t the bill, as it were – the engine bay wasn’t long enough to accommodate the Holden in-line six.

It was during this evaluation trip to Germany that the Holden men learned of a second Opel new model under development, the Senator. The Senator was a bigger car with a longer front section. It was large enough to take the Holden six, and, if they ditched the recirculating-ball steering system and tted a rack-and-pinion unit instead, there was enough room for the Holden V8 (which is why the VB Commodore was the rst full-sized Holden model to feature rack-and-pinion steering).

So while Opel continued development on its four-cylinder Rekord and larger, six-cylinder Senator, Holden opted for a combination of both models: a car based on the Rekord chassis but with the larger Senator front end grafted on.

In the end Opel opted to adopt Holden’s ‘hybrid’ design for its own Commodore model replacement (Opel rst used the Commodore name in 1967 for the premium version of the Rekord) – which was ultimately why the new Holden came to be known as Commodore.