Holden Commodore: The drive to succeed

Production of the Australian designed, engineered, developed and built Commodore ends with the closure of Holden’s manufacturing plant in Adelaide.

We couldn’t think of a better way to farewell the best-ever mass-produced Australian-built car than to take it for one last drive on some of the roads where it was developed in north-west Victoria.

But we’re farewelling more than just the Aussie Commodore here, we are saying goodbye to the most ambitious vehicle program ever undertaken in this country, and it was intended to ensure Holden’s future for decades to come.

The VE Commodore that launched in 2006 was underpinned by what has always been known locally as the Zeta architecture. This versatile vehicle skeleton was intended to become General Motors’ go-to affordable rear-wheel drive architecture globally.

Holdens, Chevrolets, Pontiacs, Buicks and even Cadillacs of various sizes and body types including at least one SUV were meant to spin off Zeta.

That plan fell apart because of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, GM’s subsequent bankruptcy and ever-tightening US fuel consumption regulations. In the end the fifth-generation Camaro was the sole global Zeta rebody.

Everything else apart from that, like the Pontiac G8, Chevrolet SS and Caprice PPV police car were much more closely linked to the donor Holden Commodore or long-wheelbase Caprice.

Zeta – the name comes from General Motors’ then policy of giving architectures a Greek name -- was originally developed because Holden needed a new-generation replacement for the modified Opel platforms that had underpinned every Commodore since the VB in 1979. It looked at all sorts of options before opting for a blank computer screen.

It was the first all-new Holden since the HQ of 1971. By the time VE debuted in August 2006 the cost of the program had topped $1 billion, also making it the most expensive local vehicle program ever.

“I had worked at Rover, Land Rover and then transitioned across to BMW,” Sheridan explained. “I had worked on the original Discovery, the original X5, some M cars and 3 Series and 5 Series.

“I can design cars from a clean sheet of paper, that’s basically what I was taught to do. Take something from nothing and create a full car … I learned my trade in the same office where Alec Issigonis penned the Mini.”

So, what were the fundamental questions and tasks Sheridan’s advanced vehicle development team faced?

“The question was: ‘We want to do this sort of car so where do we start?’. Where do you put the engine, where do you put the wheel, where do you put the occupant, how do we configure the fuel tank, what does the dashboard look like?

“It was those types of skills as well as developing a full vehicle from not just as a concept but actually putting it into production and living it from cradle to grave.”

Sheridan and his engineering group worked out of Holden’s headquarters at Fishermens Bend on the western edge of the Melbourne CBD.

This was also the home of all the key players at the top of the company driving the new concept forward.

Chairman and managing director Peter Hanenberger, who saw Zeta as the basis for a global Holden role; Michael Simcoe, the design director who understood the extensive flexible opportunities Zeta presented, and engineering boss Tony Hyde, who was determined to build the best Australian car ever.

Later, Denny Mooney replaced the retiring Hanenberger and saw VE into production.

It’s Fishermens Bend where our drive starts on a grey October morning. It’s here where we collect our ‘Phantom Black’ SS six-speed automatic. Nowadays, the it’s a far quieter place than the early 2000s when hundreds of designers and engineers were grappling with an opportunity that we now know will never come again.

“We thought ‘finally we can get rid of all the engineering compromises that we’d made in previous cars,” recalls Tony Hyde. “There’s no doubt BMW was our benchmark; that’s where we wanted to get to.

“Apart from the stress of a new car and the worrying about the cost and that sort of stuff, we were doing what we wanted to do. It was a car that had virtually no restrictions on it.”

Ten years on from his retirement Hyde remains convinced of Zeta’s significance.

“Without any doubt it was the best car we ever did.”

The SS feels instantly comfortable from behind the wheel rumbling up and down past 191 Salmon Street for the obligatory photo shoot. The bi-modal exhaust fitted along with the 304kW LS3 engine for the final VF II update in late 2015 sounds fabulous.

From Fishermens Bend our drive takes us on a typical Holden test route. East to Healesville, over the winding Black Spur, up the Maroondah Highway to the pretty town of Mansfield, then on to Whitfield on one of the Holden development team’s favourite roads.

The Alps
Often the development teams stayed at Bright before heading up and over Mount Hotham and through Dinner Plain. This was another frequent overnight stay so cold starting could be tested.

Then it was on down the far side and around through Omeo. From there it could be a run back north through Anglers Rest to Falls Creek, or continue south for the long highway haul back to Melbourne or the Lang Lang proving ground on the edge of Westernport Bay.

These were not the only roads used to develop Commodore and the various other Zeta derivatives. VE was tested all over Australia – Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Kununurra for instance -- and overseas too.

The VE even made a secret trip to Bathurst during one test drive, as former Holden chassis engineer Michael Barber, an integral part of VE’s suspension and steering development, recalls.

“I was trip captain and I insisted that we go to Bathurst for a lap. Chassis Engineering Group Manager Peter Williamson complained that it was too far out of our way. I pointed out that driving was the whole point of a test trip so nothing was out of our way.

“When we got to Bathurst Peter, now realising the significance of the moment -- first VE on The Mountain -- asked if he could drive the first lap. I told him to &%$# off and drove it myself, so I can claim to be the first to drive a VE over The Mountain.”

But what those Victorian Alpine roads provided was an easily accessible validation ground for different iterations of Zeta development mules.

There were five of them, from the earliest 2002 rebodied VX Mule Zeros, to more than 60 VE Gammas in 2005 that were the last testing stage before production. All up Holden spent $70 million on prototypes alone.

“One of my most memorable drives was in VEM016,” recalls Barber. “A V8 manual Mule 2B (which meant it had prototype VE body panels). I had this car for well over a year and did a lot of work in it. It went to Alice a few times and on other trips to the Snowies and so on.

“It was variously FE1, FE2 or Country Pack (suspension tunes) depending on the day. The V8 manual with FE1 and base level tyres is always a fun combination and I had a blast from Omeo following the river south to Bruthen, stretching the tyres to their limit.”

But these drives weren’t just about ride, handling and steering – although they were important and roads like the Whitfield Pass and the tortuous climb to Mount Hotham certainly helped develop those important assets. There were many other facts to consider.

“You are trying to validate that all the features in the car work. You are prodding and poking and trying the air-cons, the electrical systems, the radio systems, the connectivity and those sorts of things,” explains Sheridan, who went on to work on the global Zeta program and then became the chief engineer of the VF Commodore that launched in 2013.

“But you are also getting feel for brakes, performance, tyres, exhausts, engine noise. You are basically looking at everything.

“As the chief engineer you are really trying to put yourself in a true customer experience; are there things that I am seeing, hearing and feeling that are disturbing to me that I am not happy with, or not performing in the way I expected?

“We set a bar at the start of what we expect performance to be and is it hitting those things? We’d drive them then sit around at the end of every day logging the things; 25 of us with our laptops collating all the issues.”

Then they’d go back to Fishermens Bend, come up with the fixes, design and implement them, and go again.

Hot showers
But there were some fun moments that interrupted the serious work, as Barber recalls.

“We did a quick vehicle dynamics test trip to the Snowies with Tony Hyde during the Mule 2 phase. I booked the Bright Hotel in the middle of town because the owner confirmed that it was good.

“Tony was not impressed: “The Highland Motor Inn was the correct answer Barber,” he told me with his trademark crossed arms.

“I said that as long as the sheets were clean and the shower was hot then I was OK. Later I was told that this may have been my greatest career moment as Tony reported to his weekly management meeting that he believed he had just been on the cheapest test trip the company had ever run.”

When asked how the cars ran he reportedly said: “The sheets where clean and the shower was hot.”

As our drive progresses it reinforces what an exceptional job Holden’s engineering crew did on the Commodore.

The long wheelbase makes the chassis ultra-stable in big, fast bends, yet it can also negotiate the tighter stuff, firing out of hairpins with grip and zip.

But in some ways it’s no longer cutting-edge. There’s noticeable bodyroll and the brakes are stinking up the place after a hard downhill charge. But I guess that’s the point of the SS-V Redline, which has more tyre, more brake and another layer of dynamic finesse.

The long Princes Highway haul across the LaTrobe Valley emphasises the laid-back comfort of the Commodore. Yet even on roads like this the testing process continued; noise and vibration on rough surfaces and concrete sections, on-centre steering behaviour and so on.

In 2000 a senior group of Holden executives headed out along this road to do the Alpine loop in reverse. The eight-car convoy was intended to set a dynamic benchmark for the next Commodore and included a BMW 3 and 5 Series, a Lincoln LS as an indicator where Falcon might be in 2006, a brand-new Toyota Avalon straight from the USA and even a prototype Cadillac CTS.

Near Sale they encountered a group of disguised cars coming the other way. They were previous-generation Toyota Avalons, which were soon to go on sale in Australia as the brand’s large-car rival to the Commodore.

“We didn’t end up chatting to the Toyota guys but we gave them a cheery wave,” recalls former Holden director Ian McCleave. “It was quite funny.

“I am sure in those days there were people flitting all over the countryside doing testing on products they had designed for and were going to manufacture in Australia.

“Looking back, it was a bit of a poignant moment.”

The final section of our journey is through the country backroads behind Lang Lang, which were part of a huge 725km drive program for the VE’s media launch. While the Holden engineers used the Victorian Alps for regular validation, these roads were their daily fact-checkers.

And they are great roads, full of bumps, off-cambers and broken edges. As production timing neared, Holden chassis engineer Rob Trubiani says they were used more and more often and usually in the middle of the night.

“The fact the Gammas looked like real VEs we weren’t able to use public roads by day, so we would head out around 10:00pm at night,” says Trubiani, who is nowadays overseeing the tune of the new Opel-sourced imported 2018 ZB Commodore.

“We would drive till about 2:00am in the morning and then come back to the proving ground, lock the cars, go home and get some sleep and then come back in the morning and go ‘s---, now we have to change all these things’ because we weren’t happy with the car.

“We had a few moments where we had to concede the car wasn’t where we wanted it to be and we had to go back and work on it for another week or two before going out for another night drive.

“Obviously those experiences became less and less as the car matured.”

Lang Lang and the end
And finally we reach Lang Lang, the fenced off automotive playground where every generation of Holden since 1957 has been developed and where Zeta prototypes were first driven. Appropriately enough it is the end of the road.

One of Hanenberger’s final acts as Holden boss before he retired in late 2003 was to come here and sample a $530,000 Mule 2A prototype. It was the only time the man so intrinsic to Zeta’s birth and breadth of ambition experienced it before VE was launched.

“I drove only the very first prototype which the guys performed handstands to make happen before I left,’ Hanenberger, now retired in his hometown of Wiesbaden in Germany, told motoring.com.au.

“I think it still had the VY body but all the structure and chassis was Zeta and it was absolutely thrilling to drive. I could see the potential of it.

“I drove it maybe four or five weeks before I left and I was very excited. I drove it on the ride and handling track and on the dirt – always very important to drive on the dirt,” laughs Hanenberger, whose enthusiasm and commitment behind the wheel remains legendary among Holden veterans.

“I thought ‘this has the potential to be a great car’.”

Potential achieved.