It’s a sad day for those of us who liked knowing that there was a company building big, V8-powered beasts, just like here in America, down at the bottom of the Earth. The company was GM’s Australian subsidiary Holden, and today they finished their very last car. Let’s see how much changed from the first Holden to the last.
Of all the countries that weren’t America that made cars, the one that made the most American non-American cars had to be Australia, with Holden as the best example. I mean, look at this:
That’s a very American-seeming car. And it’s not really that surprising—both are big countries with similar attitudes to cars, and the very first Holden started life as a post-war Chevrolet design that GM decided was too small for the behemoths Americans were going to want.
So let’s just take a moment here and look at that very first Holden, the Holden 48-215 (sometimes called the FX), and compare it to the last one, a 2017 Holden Commodore SSV Redline:
Sorry to see you go, Holden.