Large-car loyalists a mixed blessing?

Holden Engineering boss Greg Tyus doesn't mention the company's Cruze small car, but it's obviously playing on his mind when he implies that Holden is more than just the Commodore car company.

On his arrival here the year after the introduction of the VE Commodore, Tyus was immediately struck by the intensely passionate loyalty to the brand and its locally-manufactured large car.

"When I first came here... I turned around [to a journalist] and said 'tell me, what does Holden mean to you?' The gentleman said 'V8 Supercar racing, Commodore and V8s'.

"Now, if that's the expectation of you, and you try to do a small car... or you try to do stop/start -- 'give me the horsepower, give me the kilowatt numbers -- that's what you're expected to do'.

"And when you don't do it, you're not true to that small section [of the market].

"Sometimes you're so good at something that people will not let you be anything different."

Speaking with the Carsales Network during the media drive program for the VE Series II Commodore last week, Tyus freely discussed the local perception of the brand and how that could be in conflict with what GM's management wants from the Australian subsidiary. At least some of his opinions also hold true for the other iconic automotive brand in Australia, Ford.

The blue oval mob is similarly locked into catering for vocal locals and the Falcon, with just five per cent of buyers opting for the fleet-pack XT -- according to Ford's own figures -- is supported by a determined lobby group of enthusiasts. The vast majority of buyers are purchasing the sporty XR models and the luxury-trimmed G Series cars, and buyers like those are rarely dispassionate.

The two companies have both looked at building small cars here, which might have skewed the brand image away from solely large-car manufacturing, but Ford decided against building the third-generation Focus at Broadmeadows. Holden, on the other hand, is committed to manufacturing the Cruze on the same production line as the Commodore, at the company's Elizabeth plant in South Australia.

That obvious point of difference aside, Tyus believes that both Holden and Ford occupy much the same position in the Australian market. As brands, they each attract their own very loyal following.

"Do you have to be home-grown and localised to be successful in Australia?" Tyus asked rhetorically.

"I think there's an expectation that Holden and Ford have to be. I won't weigh in on one side or the other, but I can appreciate the arguments on both sides of the [Pacific] Ocean."

The argument from the other side of the Pacific is one that has been aired on many previous occasions. It basically centres on the cost of developing unique platforms for a small market, in global terms.

"If we're trying to do something and the rest of the world's trying to do something from a corporate perspective... it's difficult to go in and say '... I'm going to work on this for a hundred units and, oh, by the way, I know you're going to be working on selling a million units, but I'm more important'. Those kind of things are always a challenge," says Tyus.

Long gone, it seems, are the days when a car could be developed from scratch in Australia. Tyus says that the VE Commodore was the last and greatest engineering project to be undertaken by a local manufacturer.

"[VE] was a very exhaustive project. I'm not sure how many years it took them..." he says of the car that reached the market the year before he arrived in Australia.  

"Especially being in Australia, I can't imagine Ford, ourselves or Toyota ever [again] really trying to do something on its own -- ground up... That would consume everybody in your organisation and you wouldn't see another improvement or anything else... for a long while."

There is a way of sharing such a load though; running a multinational team on the project, working in different time zones.

"We can't do it all at once, but that's where -- we are a global corporation -- if it's a good enough project, we can leverage the resources of the whole corporation to get things done, as long as the priorities are consistent."

The Chevrolet Camaro is one example of that, but for the whole corporation across different time zones to be involved in developing a vehicle, it has to have strong global implications.

Ford has a different idea in train, establishing the Australian R&D operation as a localised centre of expertise for the development of the T6 replacement for the Ranger LCV. It also straddles local and global responsibilities with its work on the Figo 'B segment' car for the Indian market, but both these projects also allow for engineers to be seconded to local-market-only projects -- Falcon and Territory. It saves money for Ford.

Even working that way, says Tyus, can draw fire from the global bean counters -- and the blokes who set ROI on a pedestal occasionally carry more weight than the outspoken consumer living the dream.

"That is always a challenge in any global organisation," says Tyus. "Do you want 1500 engineers fighting for 7 to 10 per cent of the market share in a small country, just so they can keep the magazines flowing, or do you want to make major profits doing a global car that can sell millions? Anyone with a logical business sense will understand that equation. Now for the passionate enthusiast, they don't necessarily get it."

Tyus doesn't admit subscribing to either viewpoint, but he's known to be an enthusiastic supporter of the local product and he backs exporting the Commodore and its derivatives outside Australia. In fact, he cites Holden's growing reputation in the North American market, both among consumers and, more importantly among senior GM management.

"I think the leadership of General Motors now -- especially under Bob Lutz -- has a much greater appreciation for what we sell, which is cars, not business strategies," he said. Tyus also mentions former Holden execs like Alan Batey who are now located in America and remain open to the Commodore returning to the American market -- initially as the police-only Caprice PPV.

"What they do, Alan Batey and others go 'Is that what we're competing against? Man, the Commodore will eat that for lunch, we've gotta get it over here'. That's what happens," explained Tyus.

"[The Commodore] has been around since 2006. Did it just start becoming a good option for police? No, it's been a decent car for a while, it's just that people were [finally] able to see the opportunity.

"The philosophy's been... if you make the car good enough and make it right, people will buy it. You just gotta get them to take a look at you again if you've lost them."

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