Jeremy Bass•14 Dec 2013

NEWS

Holden: A classic industrial rise-and-fall story

A look back through Holden's manufacturing history shows the writing was on the wall decades ago

There’s plenty of room for debate about the manufacture of Holden’s Aussie-icon status. The first Holden-badged car was worked up from discarded Chevy blueprints – even “football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars” started life as “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet”.

But there’s no arguing that the merger of Holden Motor Body Builders Ltd with General Motors (Australia) Pty Ltd under the duress of the Great Depression forged one of the nation’s biggest and most venerated manufacturing operations.

Holden dominated the local car industry for fifty years or more. But in a classic industrial-age rise-and-fall narrative, history has been creeping up on it for decades – as far back as the 1970s energy crises that first ushered in the Commodore, then helped shut down the company’s Pagewood plant in Sydney in 1980.

More so since 2003, when Toyota supplanted it as Australia’s top-selling marque. And again since 2011, when the Mazda3 knocked the Commodore off its perch as our top-selling model. Holden hasn’t won either back, and it now won’t.

Holden’s story goes back to 1856, when British immigrant James Holden set up his saddlery in South Australia. Fifty years on, under the stewardship of Holden’s grandson Edward, Holden Motor Body Builders Ltd was established in 1919.

Through the 1920s, HMBB opened operations in every state, putting its own bodies on complete knock-down chassis packs from Chevrolet and Dodge as well as building Melbourne trams.

The GM-H merger: a rescue deal from the beginning

But the Great Depression bit hard, and when sales collapsed from 34K units in 1930 to less than 1700 a year later, General Motors’ local operation acquired the company and General Motors-Holden’s Ltd (GM-H) was born.

The reinvigorated company opened its Fishermans Bend plant amid great fanfare in 1936, with another to follow in the Sydney suburb of Pagewood. After World War II, it was full steam ahead with coachwork for Buick, Chevrolet, Oldsmobile Pontiac and British maker Vauxhall.

By the mid-1940s, the industry had the federal government on side in fostering the development of Australia’s first car. It was in the pitch for this that serious competition began with Ford. GM-H stole a march on Henry by keeping the demand for taxpayer dollars down.

A four-year development program, much of it in Detroit, produced the 48-215, better known as the FX. In 1948, Prime Minister Ben Chifley pulled the wraps off Holden Number One at Fishermans Bend. The Aussie car industry was off in earnest, initially at a production rate of ten vehicles a day.

Even at a cost of £733 – 94 weeks’ average wage at the time – demand was brisk. As production and sale rose by up to 60 per cent a year through the 1950s, satellite businesses supplying materials, components and associated services flourished.

In 1951, Holden launched the 50-2106 “Coupe Utility” – aka ute – on the FX platform. Sales subsequently broke 30K a year.

By the launch of the follow-up FJ in 1953, GM-H was booming with a 30 per cent market share yielding ever higher profits. This was in part because it made truly local product, well developed for reliability in harsh Australian driving conditions.

1956: a big year

In 1956, 250K cars up, the company opened its new plant in Dandenong, Melbourne. A new, longer wheelbase model, the FE, wrapped the FJ’s 2.2-litre inline six and three-speed manual transmission in new bodywork and introduced a “Station Sedan” (aka wagon) variant.

Meanwhile, the company was also preparing the Lang Lang proving ground – the first of its kind in Australia – for opening in 1957. Export operations were expanding fast, too. By the launch of the FC facelift in 1958, Holden was selling to 17 countries.

In 1960, with local sales hitting 12K a month, the new FB introduced a fourth variant, the panel van. Mid 1961, it made way for the EK, in which it introduced optional two-speed Hydramatic automatic transmission.

The early 1960s saw a raft of updates and expansions through the EJ, EH, HD and HR series: the EJ’s up-spec Premier trim (the millionth Holden was a 1962 EJ Premier); the more potent red engine in the EH and the bigger 179ci (2.9-litre) engine in 1965’s HD.

By now, Holden product was more than 95 per cent local.

The 1966 HR got standard seat belts – an Australian first. The company also opened up a new plant in the Brisbane suburb of Acacia Ridge and expanded the Fishermans Bend operation to include R&D and foundry facilities.

The 1970s: the Kingswood, Torana and Gemini era

In 1967, Holden spun a new small car, the Torana, off the Vauxhall Viva it had been assembling for several years. It would give way in 1969 to the larger, locally developed LC, with the choice of four or six cylinders and Holden’s first three-speed auto option.

In 1968, with unprecedented autonomy, came the sea-change HK series. It retained the Premier but introduced the Belmont and Kingswood badges in place of Standard and Special.

And with the HK came two new variants: the Monaro coupe and the luxury Brougham, which sat on the same wheelbase but gained a limo look care of a lengthened rear end.

In 1969, Holden used the beautiful Hurricane concept to launch the first Aussie-designed and made 253/308 V8 for the HT update. The car also gained the three-speed auto introduced in the Torana. In 1970, Holden opened its first specialist auto transmission plant in Woodville, SA.

Later that year came the HQ model. Shifting nearly half a million units in three years, it outsold all Holdens before it.

With a rework of the Holden lion logo to move with the times in 1972, the 1970s saw a slew of facelifts and improvements through the HJ, HX and HZ series. Tightening emissions regulations saw the V8s detuned, but compensation came in a series of improvements to handling with the advent of Radial Tuned Suspension in the 1977 HZ.

The Brougham, meanwhile, morphed into the separately branded Statesman DeVille and Caprice.

Surprisingly, in 1975 the company signed a two-year sidetrack deal with Mazda which saw Wankel Rotary-powered HJ and HX Premiers rebadged and exported as the Mazda Roadpacer. Less surprisingly, it folded after just 840 sales in two years.

A foretaste of product globalisation came in 1975 with the Gemini, a joint development with Japanese affiliate Isuzu spun from German sibling Opel’s Kadett C. Gemini production went to Acacia Ridge. It proved a sales winner, dominating its segment into the 1980s and even producing a diesel variant, well ahead of its time in this country.

The Torana, meanwhile, went from strength to strength through the 1972 LJ update, with plenty of marketing help from “Peter Perfect” Brock and the triple-carbed GTR XU1, especially after victory over Ford’s GTHOs at Bathurst in 1972.

The LH series arrived in 1974 to replace the LC; it was bigger and it was engineered to accommodate fours, sixes and V8s. The racing success continued with the brutal SL/R 5000 and later the A9X assuming the XU1’s mantle.

The 1976 LX series spawned a three-door hatchback variant and the four-cylinder was rebadged Sunbird. On the decline by 1978, the Torana received a final facelift for the UC series before bowing out in 1980. But its locally made Starfire four would live on in future Commodore models.

1978: enter Commodore

1978 heralded a new direction with the VB Commodore. Here, too, was globalised product, born of the oil crisis, with its origins in Opel’s Rekord and Senator models. Buyers were initially fazed by the reduction in size, but by 1980, the VB was Australia’s best-selling car.

Like the Torana, the Commodore was made to accommodate fours, sixes and V8s.

The rationalisations that culminated in this week’s closure decision actually began back then, too, with the closure of Sydney’s Pagewood plant in 1980. Commodore production was reeled in to the SA and Victorian plants.

Holden maintained market dominance through the early 1980s with the VC, VH and VK Commodore series. But increased competition from Ford and the failure of GM’s global FWD “J-car” platform, launched in 1982 as the Camira, were showing up mid-decade in losses exceeding $500 million.

The unleaded petrol mandate in 1986 forced the company to look for an interim engine. To the delight of many, the VL series assumed Nissan’s silky, swift 3.0-litre six and four-speed auto. To the chagrin of many, it meant the closure of the Woodville transmission plant.

With Holden now $780 million in debt, its parent company agreed to pay its way out, on the proviso it restructured to split GM-H in two, resulting in the new Holden’s Motor Company (HMC) and Holden’s Engine Company (HEC), dividing duties between the Elizabeth, SA plant for bodies and the Fishermans Bend plant for engines, the latter a useful export earner.

With 1988’s VN overhaul, the Commodore turned into a big car again, now with a 3.8-litre Buick-sourced V6 assembled at Fishermans Bend.

Through the 1990s, the Commodore flourished and the Holden’s market share rose from 21 to nearly 30 per cent. But, up against governments keen to dismantle import tariff regimes, the company was looking increasingly to badge engineering and imports to fill the gaps left by the Gemini (killed off in 1986; 240K sold) and the Camira (1989; 150K sold).

Around that time, Holden entered a series of “badge engineering” deals, initially with Suzuki (Swift/Barina, Sierra/Drover 4WD), later with Nissan (Pulsar/Astra) and then with Toyota (Corolla/Nova, Camry/Apollo, Commodore/Lexcen). Amid disappointing sales for the rebadged models, the Toyota deal came to an end in 1996.

The Statesman and Caprice properties, laid off in 1984, reappeared in 1990 on the LWB Commodore wagon chassis. They’ve survived the opening up of the luxury market, even as Ford killed off its once dominant Fairlane and LTD labels in 2007.

With the VR overhaul of 1993, around 80 per cent of the car was new, right down to another rework of the logo on its grille.

In 1997, the all new VT, the result of a $600 million spend, built on the VR’s sales impetus. Safer and dynamically superior, it pushed Holden to its 1999 sales high point, fuelled by the skunkworks concept that became the Monaro in 2001, and the replacement of the local 5.0-litre V8 by the American 5.7-litre LS engine.

The 2000s: decline and fall

Early in the new millennium, even with the resurrected Monaro on hand to add excitement, things began to turn. As the Commodore went through VY (2002) and VZ (2004) updates, the latter introducing the new Alloytec V6, Toyota knocked Holden from its place as our best-selling car brand in 2003. The Japanese giant remains there to this day.

With the VE series in 2006, a billion-dollar investment by Holden removed the last vestiges of Opel input from the Commodore. It was, the company declared, the Aussiest Commodore yet made.

But as the GFC hit home with GM filing for bankruptcy in Detroit, cost cutting was evident everywhere, from the replacement of Opel-sourced models like the Astra, Vectra and early 2000s Barinas with South Korean Daewoo product to the Adventra, the AWD Commodore it pitted against Ford’s Territory. Holden actually invested heavily in Daewoo itself, assuming a controlling interest by 2005, before relinquishing it to Detroit as GM filed for bankruptcy and bailout in 2009.

In 2011, with large cars losing favour to hatches and SUVs, the Commodore lost its place as Australia’s best-selling model to the Mazda3.

The company’s announcement in 2010 that, with $149 million worth of federal government assistance, it would start building Cruze sedans and hatches in Elizabeth the following year was met with huge excitement.

So was the 2012 VF Commodore, a last tilt at the private buyer market. It looked the goods: the look was right, the drive was right, the specs were good, as was the value equation. All that was wrong was the size – buyers just don’t want big Aussie sixes.

By mid-2013 Holden was back in Canberra looking for another $250 million. But with Mitsubishi long gone, Ford declaring it’s pulling out in 2016 and a less sympathetic government staring it down, it’s now over.

Holden coverage on motoring.com.au

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>> No back-tracking for Holden

>> Holden's Commodore to miss 40th anniversary

>> Holden expects no customer backlash

>> HSV to continue beyond 2017

>> Holden has plenty of imports to consider

>> Holden heroes and villains

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