Holden back the (t)ears

So that’s it, Holden is no more….outahere, gone burger, finished, vamosed, about to leave the building for the last time!

Hard to believe it, but yep it’s true, the Detroit, USA, parent company General Motors, announcing the fact to a stunned (local) motoring community by way of press release on Monday February 17.

OK, you don’t just shut up a shop the size (not to mention cultural significance) of Holden here and – even more so – across the ditch, overnight without good reason.

Or perhaps you do.

GM appears resolute, though, stating that its intention is to have the business wound down (to nothing, one assumes) by sometime in 2021.

In this regard you have to feel for everyone directly affected by the decision and the brutal (someone I spoke to last week compared it to an amputation which I thought was as good a way to describe it) way it was made.

Think for instance of all the management and staff members at Holden dealers around the country, who – apparently – found out the same time as the rest of us.

Think too, of the hard-core fans, many of whom wear their allegiance to the brand if not on their sleeve, at least under it, in the form of a tattoo.

That’s commitment if ever I saw it. And I wonder how many execs on team that made the Holden decision have GM brand (i.e. an orange bowtie) tattoos!

Stick-on ones maybe!

That’s the (no doubt several) billion-dollar question of course, isn’t it? Is this a decision parent company General Motors going to regret?

I believe it is. Not perhaps in the short term. But marketing is a long game. And Holden is part of life here in Aussie and NZ. If nothing else GM has just burned through a bank vault full of goodwill.

Why, you may ask, do I care? Speaking strictly personally here I’m more a Ford than a Holden ‘guy.’ True, my Dad Doug owned one of the first FJ models sold in Southland. And there is some wonderful family folklore of him racing (and I’m assuming, beating!!) his cousin Peter home to Otama from the Otamita Bridge one night (many, many, moons ago now).

I was obviously too young to appreciate such a feat of daring do, however, and when I was at a more impressionable age, Ford’s Anglia was the car of choice for all the young bucks around town to ‘hot up’ and when my mother bought one, well…..it was the Blue Oval over the Red Lion every time from that point on, for me.

That doesn’t mean, however, that I haven’t appreciated the Holden marque and the part it has played on the roads and racetracks, and in the lives of generations of car, Ute and latterly SUV buyers in our little neck of the woods.

And I don’t mind admitting I was totally and utterly blind-sided when the GM press release landed in my NZ4WD mag email inbox at 02.46pm on Monday February 17.

Usually the correspondence I have received from the company’s General Manager – Corporate Affairs, Ed Finn, is of the perfunctory nature……invites to media functions, bookings for press cars, that sort of thing.

Not his time though. It’s a rare thing to use CAPITAL LETTERS (known in computer geek circles as SHOUTING) in the subject box of an email for instance.

In this case, however, I think it was totally justified.

“HOLDEN VEHICLE SALES, DESIGN AND ENGINEERING TO CEASE IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND,” read the subject line.

And sadly, the news just got worse and worse from there.

“No……, it can’t be, they wouldn’t do THAT!” was my immediate reaction.

Holden had, after-all, used a similar ‘short-sharp-shock’ press release last year when the company announced that it was killing off the Commodore.

Surely, I thought, they’re not going to shut up shop completely; what about the engineering division, rightly lauded – in my humble opinion anyway – for turning the latest Colorado 4×4 Ute into a far better overall package that the original – South American division-tuned and set-up – example.

And what about Lang Lang, the company’s famous ‘proving ground’ on the way to Phillip Island?

The short answer is that both will close.

Which is where the enormity – or perhaps a better word is ‘reality’ of parent company General Motors’ decision started to hit home.

As the company’s grandly titled International Operations Senior Vice President, Julian Blissett said in the official press release, the Holden brand will be ‘retired from sales in Australia and New Zealand, and local design and engineering operations will wind down by 2021.’

Blissett said that GM had ‘taken the difficult decision after implementing and considering numerous options to maintain and turn around Holden operations.

“Factors,” he went on to outline, “impacting the business case for further investment included the highly fragmented right-hand-drive markets, the economics to support growing the brand, and delivering an appropriate return on investment.”

Which is all very well, and bloody easy to say if your job – and with it your livelihood – is secure. But a damn site harder – as I know from my own first-hand experience being made redundant when Auckland’s The Sun newspaper folded back in the day – to stomach when you don’t know where your next pay packet is going to come from.

Holden has always been so much more than a marque of car in Australia and here. And though I know sales-wise things were ‘beyond dire’ across the Tasman I thought that local management had made a fair fist of keeping the fires burning here.

Sure, replacing the last great locally designed and assembled rear-wheel-drive Aussie-built Commodore (the VF) with an Opel-based front-wheel-drive one (the ZB) was not the best idea the company’s product planners have ever come up with, particularly when every man and his dog seems to want a Ute or SUV here and across the Tasman at the moment.

But to be absolutely fair on Holden, Nissan was caught out by the first wave of the same quantum market swing to SUVs when it released its then new Commodore-class car, the Altima with a quaint, old-skool ‘win-on-Sunday-sell-on-Monday’ Supercars campaign with the Kelly Brothers back in 2013.

Not long after Nissan realised that with large, roomy and practical SUVs in its line-up, no-one actually wanted an ‘executive’ sports saloon anymore, and promptly soon was not even importing the car the Kelly bros, Simone de Silvestro and our own Andre Heimgartner were promoting on the track.

Had Holden made the hard call back in 2017 and decided to kill off Commodore then, weathered the on-line abuse and come up with a key Aussie-acceptable SUV (as Ford did with its nominally Falcon-based Territory back in 2004) the marque might have been given a reprieve….

But it was not to be. Instead the company’s medium-large SUV offering (though a decent enough vehicle in its own right), the Acadia was more polarising than popular, and sales were only just starting to nibble away at the feet of Toyota’s market-standard Highlander here when last month’s decision by GM to cut their losses was made.

The key difference between Holden and – say – Ford, is that (and it really only hit me after talking the issue through with some equally-shocked colleagues) Ford is a truly international brand.

Holden, however, was a purely Australasian one. Sure, the Aussies have tried – half-heartedly – to build on this comparatively tiny base by exporting some models to (let’s see) the UK, the US and some territories in Asia and even the Middle East.

Since the days of the ubiquitous HQ model though there has never been – that I am aware of anyway – a volume selling model with true mass market export appeal, designed, engineered and marketed as distinctly Australian.

In theory the latest Colorado Ute should be one such ‘Holden.’ Yet on enquiring about its future (perhaps under the ‘Chevrolet’ name plate it wears in the ‘States) I was told that GM had already entered into an agreement to sell the plant where it is made – in Thailand – to Chinese rival Great Wall!!!

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water!

And though the ZB Commodore has sold in reasonable numbers here it has literally proved sale-proof at home, a point Red Bull Holden Racing’s Roland Dane made when questioned about his team’s future plans in the light of GM’s plans to ‘retire’ the Holden brand.

‘Unfortunately, an awful lot of the people who have been barracking for the Holden brand over the last 10 years or so haven’t actually been buying the product…for whatever reason,” he told Seven News on the day of the announcement.

So The pragmatist in me says ‘fair play, the ‘brand’ and all the ‘nationalistic bullshit’ associated with it was…too small, too ‘regional’ and too hidebound for a huge global corporation with a preference for left-hand-drive and a market-driven need to come up a range of electric cars, vans, trucks etc ‘tout suite’ to justify the investment needed to guarantee its survival.

Yet the motorsport nut in me goes…. hang on a minute you f….k….g Philistines, you don’t just ‘retire’ a brand when it suits you. Brands – particularly those, like Holden, with over 100 years of history in a market – are a rich source of knowledge, anecdote and marketing opportunity. In other words, they deserve ‘more’ because they are worth more, and each year they remain in the public spotlight that worth increases.

You only have to look at the blanket, carpet-bombing TV coverage an event like Bathurst gets…then think about the amount of time each year is devoted to the event’s ‘glorious history,’ and its late ‘King’ Peter Brock.

Sure, Peter drove all sorts of cars in ‘the Great Race.’ Yet every year the host broadcaster will put together an emotional roller-coaster of a reel featured ‘the great man’ and the…..let’s see, that’s right, the Holden Torana XU1, then the Holden Torana A9X and finally a line-up of Holden Commodores, from the one I consider the ‘Daddy of them All,’ the justifiably famous two-time Bathurst 1000-winning 1982 Group C model (which, by the way, sold at auction in 2018 for $AU2.1 million) right through to the VX Commodore he last suited up to contest ‘The Great Race’ in, in 2002.

Money simply cannot buy that sort of coverage and/or brand association and Brock is just one of the many ‘Holden Heroes’ whose names are now inextricably linked to the classic Aussie brand.

For fans across the Tasman there is Mark Skaife and Craig Lowndes. And for those here you only have to think of Greg Murphy…with his Lap of the Gods at Bathurst in 2003, and his five-year reign as the King of the annual New Zealand round of the V8 Supercar series at Pukekohe from 2001 to 2003 and again finally in 2005.

And I’m sure I could come up with several other examples if I put my mind to it.

This is the sort of bonus that makes calculating – or rather quantifying – any sort of return on sponsorship ‘investment’ incredibly hard, yet at the same time incredibly valuable because done right (in this case by Holden all those years ago) it is literally the gift that keeps on giving.

Or at least it was until Monday Feb 17 at 2.46pm NZ Time when GM decided it knew better……