Holden

» see holden.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

James Alexander Holden opened a saddlery in Adelaide in 1856 and the company spent its first half century in leather. It started repairing car upholstery in 1908, was building complete car bodies by the 1920s, and became a body supplier large enough that General Motors bought it outright in 1931 and made it General Motors-Holden's. That is an unusually long runway for a car company, and it matters to how Australians talked about the brand later: Holden was older than the Commonwealth of Australia by forty five years.

The 48-215 arrived on 29 November 1948, launched by the Prime Minister, and became the first car designed and mass produced in Australia. It sold on the specific promise of being built for the local conditions, with the ground clearance and the suspension travel that unsealed roads demanded, and it worked. Through the fifties and sixties Holden held somewhere near half the Australian market, which is a share no manufacturer holds anywhere any more. The Kingswood carried that position into the seventies and the Commodore replaced it in 1978.

The peak on the record is 27.5 percent of the market in 2000, and everything after that is a slide with clear causes. Australian buyers moved off large sedans and onto imported hatchbacks and then utes, while the tariff protection that had made domestic assembly viable was dismantled over two decades against a cost base that could never match Thailand or Korea. Ford said in May 2013 that it would stop building cars in Australia. Holden confirmed the same on 11 December that year, and Toyota followed in 2014. The Elizabeth plant in South Australia built its last Commodore on 20 October 2017 and closed the same day.

After that Holden was an importer with a badge, selling rebadged Opels and Chevrolets through an Australian dealer network. That business held about four percent of the market and kept falling. General Motors announced on 17 February 2020 that it was retiring the brand. The sales operation wound down over the rest of that year and the name was formally finished on 1 January 2021.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the lion and the stone ~

The emblem is a lion with its paw on a rolled stone, drawn by the sculptor Rayner Hoff in 1928, three years before GM bought the company. It refers to a piece of folklore holding that the wheel was invented by someone watching lions roll stones, which is almost certainly not true and is exactly the kind of origin story a body-builder wants on its badge. It outlasted every other visual element the company had. The lion was on the 1948 car and it was on the last Commodore in 2017 with only the styling changed.

~ the commodore ~

The Commodore ran from 1978 to 2020 and it is the thing people mean when they say Holden. Rear-wheel drive with a six or a V8, big enough for a family and cheap enough to be the default answer, and after 1993 the body was designed in Australia rather than adapted from an Opel. It was also a touring car, and the Bathurst 1000 built a rivalry with Ford's Falcon that ran for fifty years and did more for both brands than any advertisement.

Turkey had its own attempt at this, and it is why the Holden story reads to me as something other than a foreign business story. The Anadol was built by Otosan from 1966, with a fiberglass body because steel pressing plant was beyond what the market could justify, and it is remembered here with affection and no illusions. It never became the national default the way Holden did. What Australia had was the version that actually worked, a car that a whole country treated as its own for seventy years, and that is the part I am reading about from outside rather than the part I lived.

~ 17 february 2020 ~

General Motors did not sell Holden. It closed it. The announcement said the company had looked at what it would take to keep a right-hand-drive brand viable and concluded that the investment could not be justified, which in plain terms means GM decided it was leaving the right-hand-drive world rather than fixing its position in it. The same restructuring exited Thailand and ended Chevrolet sales in India.

The Australian reaction was sharper than a normal brand closure because of what had been spent keeping the manufacturing alive. Successive federal governments had paid subsidies to GM for decades on the argument that a domestic car industry was worth having, and the plants closed anyway in 2017, and the badge closed three years after that. The Prime Minister said publicly that he was angry about it, which is not a thing prime ministers usually say about a product line.

~ the badge afterward ~

GM kept a presence through General Motors Specialty Vehicles, importing Corvettes and Silverados under the Chevrolet name with right-hand-drive conversion done locally. It is a small operation and it is not Holden. The dealer network was compensated and dissolved, the warranty and parts obligations run to 2031, and the Elizabeth site has been redeveloped.

The cars are still everywhere on Australian roads and the last locally built Commodores now trade for more than they cost new.

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