CAR OF THE YEAR: Holden Commodore, Well, it really couldn’t have been anything else, could it?

HOLDEN’S COMMODORE is the 1978 Car of the Year – the 15th winner to take out the prestigious award, the most deserving and certainly the most predictable.

With one grand sweep the Commodore has changed all that. To date we’ve driven 16 Commodores over more than 4000 km in three states to have our initial enthusiasm confirmed and reinforced so strongly that there can be no doubt that here is the best Australian car ever. Let’s go many steps further and say that here is one of the world’s great sedans … a car that offers most of the qualities of the European and Japanese cars together with the traditional virtues of Australians and, best of all, at a price that makes it astonishingly good value for money.

The fact is that the Commodore does live up to the high expectations of a public that has deserted GMH in droves over the past decade because Holdens didn’t offer the kind of motoring expected by a more intelligent, dare we say perceptive, audience. The Holden had changed from being an everyman’s car to the car for the blue collar worker while the white collar people have driven Japanese or European cars.

The men inside GM also knew that it needed to be better than just good. For Opel it needed to be sufficiently refined to compete head-on with BMW and Mercedes-Benz; for Holden it had to be so good that it set new standards not just in its class, but across the market in order to re-establish the marque in the eyes of all those people who had switched their allegiance; for Vauxhall it needed to be good enough to break back into a market long ago deserted by the British branch of General Motors; and in South Africa it had to rate in a straight fight against the Ford Granada.

While GMH is at great pains to emphasise the Australian design and component content in the Commodore, it is honest enough to openly admit “Commodore is the product of a marriage of GM’s international resources and GMH’s specific local engineering and design expertise”.

The modifications necessary to adopt the car to take local engines and transmissions were only the beginning of a task which saw the Australian Commodore get a new steering system, much modified MacPherson strut front suspension, improved body strength, dust sealing and rust prevention, and an outstanding new braking system.

Such is the standard of the Commodore that it is going to draw sales away from a far broader spread of cars than just the medium sixes. GMH lists its competition as Falcon, Valiant, Datsun Skyline, Cortina Six, Volvo, Toyota Cressida, and Sigma in claiming that half of the forecast 65,000 Commodores it will sell in 1979 will be business which would otherwise have gone to other companies.

We would go further and say that the new Holden deserves to sell way up-market and should draw sales away from Peugeot, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Rover, Saab, Citroen, Alfa, and Lancia as well as deep down into the four-cylinder market of Datsun 200B, Toyota Corona, and Mazda. The Commodore will satisfy them all.

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