The end of the show

And that was that. Holden rolled out other concepts such as E jy and Coupe 60 in coming years, but they were sporadic.

Why did TT36 mark the end of this era? Both men have their theories.

Hughes: “I think we got bigger, I think there were more people looking in from US, we had to do the [Zeta-based] Camaro. We were still small at that time, we were just torn from pillar to post. I just remember how busy we were. It just came to ‘how they hell are we going to do show cars?’”

Ferlazzo: “There were a couple of problems. We had done just about every bodystyle of Commodore by then… and then started to uff around the edges with things like El ns. It had run its course, we had achieved our goal. We had created a lot of excitement and credibility.”

That credibility extended to GM in Detroit. The Melbourne design centre became integral to global design for multiple brands. It was one of only two GM design centres with the ability to build running concepts.

Even after Holden shut down local manufacturing in 2017 the studio lived on,

lled to the gills with work. But it couldn’t survive the death of the brand.

“We were full, we had work going out for years,” said Ferlazzo. “We could have kept going but they chose not to. They chose to rip the band-aid off in one go.”

Among Ferlazzo’s nal acts as the nal Holden design director was to ensure those 1998-2004 concepts and so many other important Holden historic models were allocated to museums in Australia where they will be on display to us all.

So don’t just read about the likes of the Commodore Coupe and the TT36 here, go and see them and marvel at a brief yet brilliant period in Aussie car design.