Holden
With GM having decided to ‘retire’ the Holden name, we re ect on the marque’s long history – and examine the role of GM in the loss of an Aussie icon
For many of us, this is unthinkable. Those old enough to remember how ‘Australia’s Own’ Holden revolutionised transport in Australia in the 1950s probably never would have imagined that it would ever come to this. And their children, the post-Baby Boomers, many of whom grew up in a suburban Australia where the family car was either a Holden or a Ford (and sometimes a Valiant), but mostly a Holden – for most of them, even those not interested in cars, Holden was such an integral feature on the Aussie cultural landscape that it would be hard to imagine an
Australia without Holdens.
Even those who did know that Holden wasn’t actually Australian-owned…
The announcement by parent company General Motors to ‘retire’ its Australian brand shook the nation. It shouldn’t have, though. In real terms, the end had already come – and a long time ago, too: back in 2013, when GM decided to cease manufacturing cars in Australia. In a way, we’re grieving today over a death that actually occurred more than six years ago.
But there is no place for sentiment in business – even if Julian Blissett, the guy GM sent out here to deliver the bad news, did at least try to be suitably sombre as he announced the death of Holden in front of his Australian audience.
But as Blissett also explained, when the numbers don’t stack up, they don’t stack up... And that’s what ultimately killed Holden.
That, and a few other factors. Like some poor decision making and a generally below-par performance from General Motors at least across the last 20 years.
It’s very easy to blame Holden management for ‘misreading’ the market, for continuing to manufacture large cars when the family car market was turning in favour of SUVs (as so many smug commentators and self-appointed experts have told us since the news of Holden’s death broke). If only it was that simple…
Perhaps Holden’s marketing and product planning could have been better, but in an
Australian car market that’s never been more fragmented, and has never offered more choice – at last count, there is a bewildering 51 car brand offerings in this country – it probably wouldn’t have mattered what type of vehicle Holden made.
In reality, specialising in the manufacture of large rear-drive cars was probably Holden’s best option. Buying trends might have shifted to other market segments, but the demand for Commodore, though on a downwards trend, remained strong till the end.
GM could have been more helpful here, too. GM could have had a more coherent plan for its Australian operations as a base for its rear-drive products. After all, the VE Commodore development formed the basis of the ‘Zeta’ platform, which was meant to have been GM’s global rear-drive platform. A smart idea: use the Australian arm, with all its experience making rear-drive cars, to be the one-stop shop for GM’s future
A high-stakes Hockey game
As the country shook with the news of the death of Holden (as if no one apart from the Holden workers who became unemployed at the end of 2017 had noticed that local manufacturing of Holdens had ceased a fair while ago), Prime
Minister Scott Morrison said he was ‘angry’ that ‘Australian taxpayers put millions into this multinational company’ only for them to let the brand ‘wither away’. There is some truth in that simplistic analysis, but while the PM was giving GM a ogging he conveniently left out the fairly major part his colleagues in the Tony Abbott government (of which he was a cabinet minister) had played in Holden’s demise more than seven years earlier.
The Abbott administration was barely two months in office when new treasurer Joe Hockey, keen to implement the conservatives’ free market agenda as hard and as fast as possible, managed to goad GM into quitting manufacturing in Australia. That right there was the beginning of the end for Holden, and the sounding of the death knell for our entire automotive manufacturing industry.
With Ford already having made its decision to close its plants, the Holden news brought the rest of the industry down like a house of cards. While ever there had been three major car makers, the economies of scale were sufficient to support the all-important myriad of smaller component makers in the supply chain. Ford’s exit put all of that under strain; the Holden announcement made continuing alone economically untenable for Toyota.
Some, however, say it’s actually a positive thing: that Joe Hockey and the Coalition should be applauded for ending the subsidisation of the car industry. After all, why should we taxpayers provide hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to multinational corporations such as GM just for the privilege of having them setting up shop here?
It’s a complex issue. Whether the public spend was worth it in terms of the jobs and economic bene ts the industry provided isn’t easy to quantify. But counting numbers of votes is something that’s not too hard, and in the leadup to the 2016 federal election the Coalition realised it had a problem on its hands with the numbers in South Australia.
As unemployment soared amid the shutting of factory doors across Adelaide’s industrial centres as Holden prepared to close its plants, it was feared a voter backlash in SA would sweep the nowMalcolm Turnbull administration out of office.
So to help assuage the South Australians, the Coalition back ipped on a decision to award a $50 billion contract to a French company to build 12 Barracuda submarines in France. Instead, the French company would be building them at the Adelaide Osborne shipyards – with a workforce partly provided by retrenched Holden workers reskilled for the ship industry under a scheme funded by the SA government.
Three years on and no work on the 12 subs had yet been done by anyone, as the project was still to get underway while a range of ‘differences’ between the French and the Australian government were sorted out.
By then, Joe Hockey had long since departed the political scene. He lost the treasury portfolio in the August 2015 spill that saw Turnbull topple Abbott, then resigned from parliament two months later. Three months after that he was off to Washington DC to take up the position of Australia’s new Ambassador to the United States.
You have to wonder about the wisdom of politicians sometimes. Politicians such as Karen Andrews, our current federal industry minister. Andrews was interviewed on TV the day GM announced the death of Holden. In her responses, it was absolutely clear that she did not know there was a difference between Holden and GM. Our federal industry minister believed (and possibly still does) that Holden and General Motors are the same thing!
rear-drive chassis architecture.
But the chaos in icted on GM by the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 saw the American giant deviate from the script. GM put most of the Zeta ‘Global RWD Architecture’ plans on hold. Holden’s second version of the Zeta platform, the basis of the VF, ended up being used for the fth generation Camaro, but that was all.
In the VE/VF series Commodore, Holden presented GM with a relatively inexpensive world-class large rear-drive sedan. Had there been the vision, had there been a coherent, concerted plan from GM to properly market the VF in the northern hemisphere, it might just have been a winner.
GM’s efforts to package the Monaro as the reborn Pontiac GTO ultimately failed when GM decided to retire the Pontiac brand – another consequence of the GFC. And while the Chevrolet SS (Commodore VF SS by another name) was warmly applauded by critics, GM wasn’t able to nd a buying audience for a car that, as a keenly-priced rear-drive, four-door high performance V8 sedan, really only had the ageing Chrysler 300C and the (inferior) Dodge Charger as its competition.
Holden’s share of the market might have been not what it once was when crunch time came, but even in 2017 it was still selling a lot of locally made Commodores. Certainly a lot more than when it was selling imported Commodores.
The ZB Commodore has proven a spectacular failure. And yet it’s actually a pretty decent car. The problem with the ZB isn’t the model itself, but rather what the ZB is not – it’s not a real Commodore, because it’s not available in reardrive con guration, doesn’t have a V8 option, and (let’s face it) isn’t made in Australia.
In hindsight it’s easy to see that attaching the Commodore name to the imported Opel Insignia was the wrong way to go. But the marketing types who decide these things were stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place: in Commodore they had a proven and well-known name. Had they opted for the freshslate approach and called the ZB something else (because logically that’s what should have happened – the ZB was too great a departure from the old Commodore to be a credible new model Commodore), and then it didn’t sell, they’d be blamed for that failure and also for killing the Commodore name. Clearly, no one wanted to risk becoming the architect of that.
The other thing the ZB wasn’t, was a Toyota Camry, Mazda6, or Hyundai Sonata. In real terms those were its market segment competitors. The ZB was a new and unproven player in a market that had some longestablished quality performers. ZB was up against it regardless of whether it was called a Commodore, Insignia or even a Torana.
While GM might have done more for Holden in key areas, Holden wasn’t without its allies in Detroit. Mark Reuss is GM’s global head of product development, but we know him here as Holden’s boss during a stint down under from 2008-’09. Reuss did not forget Holden after he went back home. It was Reuss who was largely responsible for securing the Pontiac GTO and Chevy SS Holden export deals, as well as the use of the SS (Commodore VF) as GM’s NASCAR silhouette.
Holden has had its challenges over the past 15 or so years but its biggest problem is that it is owned by GM.
He also played a big role in ensuring the Equinox and Acadia were made in right-hand drive – at considerable expense, but speci cally so that Holden would have product to sell in the important SUV sector.
The question is, though: are the Equinox and Acadia actually any good?
When it comes to cars, I reckon it’s always a good idea to listen to your mechanic. I still remember what my mechanic told me back in 2013, when it was announced that Holden would cease manufacturing cars in Australia in four years’ time.
“Holden’s stuffed,” he shrugged. The Commodore, he told me, is the only decent car Holden has. The rest of the Holden range, said the man who services and repairs cars for a living, was poorly built and unreliable – and therefore not worth owning. By his reasoning, if they were killing off the only good product they had, they might as well just shut up shop right now rather than wait for the inevitable.
If my mechanic’s assessment of the Holden offering in 2013 was correct, it doesn’t look as though things changed much over the ensuing six years. None of Holden’s recent small and medium sized cars (does anyone remember the Malibu? Epica, anyone?) were showroom sales successes, and even if the Equinox and Acadia are quality SUVs, they’re tainted by the stain of their predecessor, the unloved Captiva.
When Julian Blissett was delivering the bad news, he made a point of stressing that the decision was in no way a re ection on the efforts of the people at Holden.
It’s nice that he should say so. Because even while it is true that Holden could have done things better, in the end it was let down by its parent company.
The fact is that GM’s right-hand drive model range didn’t stack up against its competitors. In the end, GM has found the going so tough that it has decided to quit the right-hand drive market altogether. Drive-on-the-left-side countries might only amount to 25 percent of the overall car market (if only we’d all switch to left-hand drive – it would make it so much easier for the likes of GM), but one quarter of a rather enormous pie is still a very large and lucrative market from which the giant American auto maker has chosen to simply walk away.
Holden has had its challenges over the past 15 or so years but its biggest problem is that it is owned by GM.
1835 James Alexander Holden born in Staffordshire, England
1852 James Alexander Holden emigrates to Adelaide, South Australia, aged 17
1856 James Alexander Holden establishes saddlery in King William St, Adelaide
1859 Henry James Holden born (son of JA Holden)
1865 Company now known as JA Holden & Company, moves to bigger premises in Gawler Place
1871 New partnership formed with Alfred Birks in a subsidiary retail business – Holden & Birks
1875 Holden & Birks dissolved and JA Holden & Co reestablished
1879 Henry James Holden joins the family business, name changed to JA Holden & Son
1885 James Holden sells business to son, Henry; German-born Henry Frost becomes junior partner in renamed company, Holden & Frost, which expands into repairing horse-drawn carriages and coaches
1887 James Alexander Holden dies, aged 52
1905 Edward Holden, son of Henry Holden, joins Holden & Frost
1908 Holden & Frost manufacture car hoods and upholstery
1909 Henry Frost dies
1913 Holden & Frost manufacture motorcycle sidecar bodies
1914 Holden & Frost produces its rst custommade car body
1917 Amid govt wartime import restrictions, Holden & Frost produce car bodies mainly for Dodge and Buick imported chassis
1918 Holden’s Motor Body Builders set up as a division of Holden & Frost, produces nearly 600 car bodies
1919 Using state-of-the-art production techniques HMBB revolutionises the industry, upping production to nearly 1600 bodies
1923 Holden designs and builds more than 12,000 car bodies for range of different imported chassis
1924 New plant opened at Woodville, SA. Facility is so good that General Motors shelves plan to open its own body-building factory, instead reaching agreement with
1925 The rst closed-type bodies produced amid more than 34,000 Holden-made car bodies. Holden also now building train carriages, bus and tram bodies
1926 GM establishes Australian operation, General Motors Australia (GMA), with assembly plants in all ve mainland state capitals, tting Holden bodies to GM’s imported chassis
1928 Holden lion symbol
rst used, xed to all Holden bodies in a pressed metal nameplate
1931 Hit by the Great Depression, Holden’s Motor Body Builders remains closed for much of the year, production down to 1600 bodies. GM buys Holden’s Motor Body Builders and merges it with GMA to form General Motors-Holden’s
1932 Car sales continue to fall – by 90% since
1928. GM sends former Vauxhall director Laurence Hartnett to Australia, telling Hartnett GM-H will be shut down if it remains unpro table
1935 Substantial pro t declared as sales begin to lift. Holden produces ‘All-Enclosed Coupe’ body for Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Chevrolet chassis, the ‘Sloper’ – a uniquely Australian design with upward lifting boot and a fold-down rear seat
1936 Fishermans Bend assembly plant and Holden headquarters established in
Melbourne. Talks begin between Hartnett and Holden executives about an all-Australian made car
1937 Holden ts all-steel bodies to GM chassis. Holden pioneered this method with Plymouths a full year before GM was producing its own steel bodies in the US. Holden’s 6500 workforce builds more than 32,000 bodies, mostly for GM chassis
1938 Holden installs new 1000-ton press, the largest in the country
1939 Advent of unitary construction (Holden builds its rst such car in that year’s Vauxhall J-Type) brings forward talk of an Australian car, as the new construction technology was expected to make body manufacture for imported chassis economically uncompetitive.
Holden also learns that planned future
GM models are expected to be too large for
Australian market.
WW2 put Australian car plans on hold
1940 Holden factories used in war effort: machine guns, armoured cars, troop carriers, boats, aircraft bodies
1942 Holden becomes the rst company in Australia to mass-produce engines, with Gypsy Major aeroplane engine, Gray Marine 6-71 Detroit Diesel and a fourcylinder radial torpedo engine
1943 Amid hopes WW2 will soon end, Holden engineers start designing the ‘Project 2000’ Australian car prototype using Willys mechanicals
1944 Federal govt invites submissions from companies interested in producing an Australian car
1945 Design of the Australian car project starts in Detroit, while the local Project 2000 continues
1946 Holden recommences production of imported GM vehicles. Holden engineers sent to Detroit with Project 2200. They start work on the US design proposal and receive instruction on setting up the manufacturing operation. Three handmade prototypes are produced, then shipped to Melbourne with the returning Australian Holden engineers and 22 US technicians
1947 Holden prototypes extensively tested on rough roads outside Melbourne
1948 Secret production run of 10 Holden cars conducted in Melbourne in April to ‘clear the line.’ The 48-215 model Holden is launched by Prime Minister Ben Chi ey in November
1949 Demand for 48-215 exceeds expectation. Holden continues to assemble imported British and American cars