Is Holden better off dead?

Thursday, 18 February 2021

As far as life and death choices go, Holden diehards tend to think that Holden should have kept building V8 Commodores or just go away. Which is exactly what General Motors did.

We knew that Holden executives had investigated a number of different – and increasingly desperate – options in an attempt to keep the brand alive, but it has now been revealed that most of them would have horrified Holden fans even more than a FWD Commodore and some rebadged Chevrolet SUVs ever did.

According to Australia’s Car Advice website official Holden documents confirming some of the radical survival proposals have surfaced, which it has also verified with “senior Holden insiders who were part of the team trying to turn Holden around.”

While Holden’s troubles started long before the ZB Commodore, the big problems began just before that car was launched in early 2017. At the time, General Motors was preparing to sell Opel and Vauxhall to PSA (the Peugeot/Citroën group, now a part of Stellantis) and Holden was understandably concerned about the long-term availability of future models, but particularly the ZB Commodore, which was a rebadged Opel/Vauxhall Insignia.

This pushed Holden to look elsewhere for new models, with the first stop being Honda.

Holden pushed the ‘Australia’s car’ thing hard for decades. Customers where genuinely shocked when they realised they weren’t all built there.

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Would a Honda Jazz badged as a Holden Barina have worked? We never got to find out.

While it seems out of left field, General Motors has long had ties with Honda, collaborating with the Japanese company of hydrogen vehicle development and, more recently EVs, so the company offered a swap – a rebadged Colorado ute in return for a rebadged Jazz, which would sell in Australia (and, presumably, New Zealand) as the Barina.

Rebadged MGs as Holdens? Your average Holden fan was outraged by a European Commodore, a Chinese one would have made their heads explode.

There was an ulterior motive to this offer too – GM had excess production space at its Thailand plant that produced the Colorado, thanks to tanking sales in Australia (although it still sold strongly in New Zealand), so would need to find a way to build more to keep the plant out of the red.

However Honda wasn’t interested in a ute and had already decided against developing the Jazz to meet the Australia Design Rules (ADRs) due to shrinking profit margins on small cars, so turned the offer down.

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That meant Holden had to forge ahead with the US-sourced Equinox and Acadia SUVs, both intended to buy the Aussie maker enough time to figure out what to do next. Unfortunately, despite being capable enough machines, neither fired on the market.

Doubly unfortunate was the slowdown of Colorado sales in Australia. According to Car Advice, insiders and dealers blamed poor marketing decisions following the local manufacturing shutdown.

It would be easy to argue that the short, sharp shock that Holden's weren’t actually built in Australia – that an astonishingly large amount of Australian consumers that were genuinely surprised by – was the cause, which in turn was the result of Holden leaning hard on the “Australia’s car” theme for many decades, even when the only vehicle it built in Australia was the Commodore.

In fact, the drop in sales was so rough that, further aided by weak “intent to buy” survey results, Holden executives were already fearing a brand shutdown in 2018.

This led to the most radical proposal Holden considered to save the brand: a tie-up with China’s largest carmaker – SAIC Motor, owners of the MG and LDV brands.

GM already had a 50:50 joint venture with SAIC dating back to 1997, so it was certainly possible. It went further than the Honda proposal too.

In 2019, Holden proposed rebadging the LDV T60 ute, LDV D90 SUV, the LDV G10 van – alongside MG3 and MG6 passenger cars and MG GS and ZS SUVs. Another version of the proposal had Holden dealers selling MG and LDV cars alongside Holdens and Chevrolets, so desperate was the situation.

This would mean that the bulk of Holden's line-up would be Chinese machinery, along with the Equinox and Acadia. Holden Special Vehicles would still exist to convert left-hand Chevys like the Camaro and Silverado, as well as sell the RHD Corvette that was dangled in front of Holden as “proof” that the company was safe in the GM embrace, when it most certainly wasn’t.

In the end, the SAIC tie-up was a much more complex task than it initially seemed, and was eventually ruled out.

Holden even went as far as considering straight-up buying the distributorship of LDV from Australian distributor Ateco, but that never happened either.

So there were some fairly comprehensive plans to actually save Holden, but would Holden fans have actually bought into it? Judging by the failure of the Commodore in Australia, probably not.

All in all, it probably really is best that the Holden brand died when it did.