Five slightly obscure Holden Commodore facts
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
With the revelation that the next-generation Commodore for 2018 will be based on the FWD Opel Insignia (albeit with an AWD version as well), Holden has opened a new chapter in the book of Commodore.
Here we take a look at five weird facts about the Holden Commodore.
The keys
The very first Commodore was, rather controversially at the time, basically an Opel Rekord with a new nose grafted on the front and engines carried over from the HZ Kingswood.
But when it came time to produce a wagon version Holden was a bit stuck. Because the wagon sheet metal had to be imported from Opel in Germany it wasn't quite a seamless production process. This was particularly obvious when it came to the keys: the VB wagon had one key for the ignition and doors, but another separate one for the tailgate.
The race
While Commodore success became commonplace at the annual Bathurst race at Mount Panorama in New South Wales, neither the original VB, nor the VN from 1988 had any success there.
It wasn't due to any lack of motorsport success on the part of the VB, as Peter Brock's HDT team took the championship in emphatic fashion in 1980 in a VB. It was just that Bathurst success in particular eluded it. The VN, on the other hand, was one of the many victims of the dominance of the mighty Nissan GT-Rs that had a stranglehold on The Mountain in that era of the sport.
The Toyota
As well as being denied Bathurst success, the VN also suffered the ignominy of being sold as a Toyota in Australia.
Under the misguided 'Button plan' the Australian government forced on local manufacturers to reduce the amount of protection they received via import tariffs, Holden sold a number of Toyota models rebadged as Holdens - the Apollo was a Camry and the Nova was a Corolla. In return Toyota got to sell the VN Commodore as a Toyota Lexcen, but only with a 3.8-litre engine. It didn't work and Aussie buyers shunned the badge-engineered cars.
The Buick
Back in the mid-1990s General Motors first started teasing Holden about producing a left-hand drive version of the Commodore for US consumption.
This led GM to give Holden a large sums of money, telling it to go away and sort a LHD version of the forthcoming VT platform. The result was displayed in the Buick XP2000 concept of 1995, which, apart from the nose, gave away a few early glimpses of the VT's styling. GM chickened out, however, and Holden used the engineering development it did to sell LHD VTs into Asia, Brazil and the Middle East as Chevrolets.
The Australian
While there is currently shock over the next-gen Commodore being based on an Opel, the VE and VF are actually the only Commodores not based on Opels!
Everything from the 1978 VB right through to the 2006 VZ was based on the GM V platform developed by Opel in the 1960s. The Europeans finally dropped it in 2003, but Holden soldiered on until the VE's development saw the introduction of the Australian designed and engineered Zeta platform in 2006. The Zeta platform was also be used under the fifth-generation Chevrolet Camaro before being replaced by the Alpha platform for the latest model.
**READ MORE:
* The truth about the next generation Holden Commodore
* Next Holden Commodore will be German