Holden - Commodore

If anyone has the Maxwell books for VL VR VS VT please scan the front cover and email it to me! holden@toughguy.net

21 years - The key to the Commodore
First Published: The Sun-Herald
Monday, October 11, 1999

Holden's Commodore comes of age this month with its 21st birthday. But the road to maturity has been a long and bumpy one for "Australia's Own", reports BOB JENNINGS.

In the 1970s, the world's governments and car makers were running scared. Middle Eastern oil producers had turned off the tap in an endeavour to boost prices for the "black gold".

Suddenly fuel consumption became a priority issue, and big was no longer beautiful.

Holden, which had been cruising along in Australia in the inexorable US company fashion of producing ever-bigger and ever-heavier cars, decided in a radical about-face that the Kingswood and its derivatives did not fit its marketing concept of leaner and more economical transport.

Conveniently, Opel, the German subsidiary of General Motors, had smaller sedans than the Kingswood which about fit the bill for Holden's brief of a smaller car for the Australian market.

Opel had the Rekord and Senator models, which GM was planning on forming the basis for its second "world car". The Australian engineers had the task of grafting on local suspension to go with the Holden six-cylinder engine.

Initial tests showed there was plenty of work to do, with the body showing signs of breaking up under testing, simply not being strong enough to carry the local componentry over Australian-style rough roads.

Unfortunately, in parallel with some excellent design, the Commodore has also had a history of problems, and the latter series have had some major ones; they include recalls of 120,000 cars for automatic transmission leaks which in the worst cases threatened under-bonnet fires, and even a 30,000-car recall in April this year because of the possibility of faulty air bag sensors which led to a handful of cars having airbags triggering for no apparent reason.

But let's go back to its beginnings; the original Rekord/Senator vehicle was toughened up by the local engineers and the total investment in the design and development to transform it into the VB Commodore was $110 million. The people involved reckoned they could have built a new car from scratch for about the same money, such was the amount of work which had to be put into the base German cars.

When it eventually reached production in October 1978, it turned out to be a lively, agile car, although some critics reckoned it to be a bit too sharp in its reactions which made it nervous to drive compared to the bigger, heavier and softer HZ Kingswood which stayed in production until 1980.

The old in-line six cylinder engine wasn't particularly economical, and with the introduction of the VC Commodore in 1980 came a four-cylinder version, powered (a loose use of the term) by the 1.9-litre Starfire engine which had first seen the light of day in the four-cylinder Torana.

This gave the Commodore an oddball engine range. The car came with either the lethargic four-cylinder engine, a 2.85-litre or 3.3-litre in-line six, or a 5.0-litre V8 which had as much to do with economy as the Starfire had to do with performance.

But the compact body with the big engine concept was too good a package for the racers to resist; Peter Brock, racing for the Holden Dealer Team and commercialising its success, released the HDT "Brock" Commodore and gave the whole thing credibility by winning Bathurst in a VC, partnered by Jim Richards.

Holden was committed to the smaller family car concept, although the Australian market wasn't entirely convinced. Across Melbourne at Broadmeadows, Ford was busily cranking out big cars for a big country, fuel crisis or no fuel crisis.

Ford's rounded XC Falcon saw the company through - with a major six-cylinder engine revision which included a cross-flow cylinder head - until the introduction of the square-look, still-big XD in 1979.

"Styled by Australians" the Ford blokes proudly proclaimed, and the XD was built on the floorplan of the XC although some of the overhangs had been trimmed and it was 136mm shorter and 40mm narrower.

Ford cranked out more than 206,000 of the XDs during its model life from 1979 until 1982. Meanwhile, Holden built 95,906 VB Commodores, 121,807 of the 1980 VCs and 141,000 of the VH model, which was produced from 1981 until 1984.

It was a classic big car versus little car battle, and Ford wasn't doing badly in the sales contest, despite some dubious dynamic attributes.

(VK slots in here, left out of orginal story, think VH with plastic bumpers and a revised 202)

Holden came back with an answer to the problems of meeting exhaust emission, economy and smooth running in its under-stressed old six by doing a deal with Nissan which resulted in the 1986 VL Commodore having a 3.0-litre overhead camshaft in-line six-cylinder engine. It had 33 percent more power and 15 percent better economy than the locally-built six.

And to give the new model a further boost, there was a turobcharged version as well, which lifted power to 150kW, giving very strong and smooth performance. This engine was available in both the sedan and the wagon, the latter being a particularly handy combination of practicality and performance.

The only problem was that Holden was caught in a currency crunch, with the Australian dollar wilting against the Japanese yen. This made the Japanese-built Nissan engine a far more expensive item than had been anticipated and popular contemporary opinion had it that Holden was losing money on every Nissan-engined Commodore sold.

While Ford barreled along with its big XD and XE models Holden took stock of the market and returned to a "full-sized" Commodore (read that as being as big as the Falcon) with the VN in 1988. It dropped the Nissan engine like a hot potato in the process.

Once again the new Commodore was based on an Opel design and once again the local engineers needed to carry out major surgery to adapt it to local running gear (which included a "new" 3.8-litre V6 engine) and Australia's demanding climatic and road conditions.

The engine was a simple, sturdy pushrod iron block and head thing from GM's Buick division. It wasn't as quiet or as smooth as the Nissan, but it had plenty of torque for the bigger and heavier car, and importantly came in on the right side of the financial line.

Meanwhile, a public rift had developed between Brock and the powers that be at Holden, who objected to Brock's marketing of the Energy Polariser, a device of magnets and crystals supposed to enhance the cars to which it was fitted.

Holden severed its connections with Brock's HDT Special Vehicles operation and in 1988 set up its own Holden Special Vehicles concern in partnership with Briton Tom Walkinshaw. The successful and high-profile Holden Racing Team sprung from this organisation.

(VP like VK was left out of orginal story, this time VN with revised v6 and different grill amongst other changes)

The VN Commodore was widely applauded; bigger, roomier and more contemporary-looking than the previous models although not without its mechanical and manufacturing problems. It's in-service reliability sometimes stumbled, an Achilles heel which continued through to the VS model launched in 1995.

Nevertheless, the VR set new standards in passive safety; it was the first Australian-made car to have driver and passenger airbags. It also offered an independent rear suspension system (again, a derivative of an Opel design) and anti-lock brakes.

In 1997 Holden unveiled the VT, a seriously large - and heavier - vehicle with an even larger wagon.

It has been a sales success, the factory at Elizabeth, north of Adelaide, continually expanding its production to meet demand, and broadening the car's appeal by making a left-hand drive model aimed at overseas markets.

The humble Commodore has come a long way in 21 years, albeit through peaks and troughs. Will the nameplate be strong enough to survive a further 21 years, or will we look back on it like the Kingswood?

Since this article was written, the VX was released in September 2000, a worthy succssor to the VT (ie we changed a few panels and gave it a new model name!)