Five years on from the last Aussie car: Post-Holden, we want more utes, bigger trucks, electric cars, everything Toyota and cheapies from China

This month marks five years since the final Australian-made car rolled off the production line.

In the years leading up to that, most questions seem to have centred upon what the future of the large sedan like the Holden Commodore would look like, post local manufacturing.

With the benefit of hindsight, the answer was nothing, literally, as buyers go for anything but what Australians bought by the tens of thousands every year since the middle of last century. Dropped like the proverbial hot potato.

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We explore how our tastes changed so profoundly, so quickly leading up to and since that final, era-ending VF Commodore rolled off the Elizabeth production line in Adelaide, as well as why.

It's as if Holden as well as the Australian car industry never existed.

Big. Roomy. Tough. Default rear-wheel drive. Sounds suspiciously like today’s two bestsellers, the Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger utes, right?

Utes are the new black

Let's set the scene with some essential background.

Right up until those last Ford Territories, Falcons, Toyota Camrys and Holden Commodores were made in Australia between 2016 and 2017, the large family car was what most people associated the Australian car industry with generally, and Holden in particular – be it Commodore, Kingswood, Special or Standard in descending chronological order right back to the first Holden in 1948.

Big. Roomy. Tough. Default rear-wheel drive.

Sounds suspiciously like today's two bestsellers, the Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger utes, right? It brings to mind another cliché, the one about the more things change. Which is no coincidence, since one-tonne trucks had outsold large cars in Australia for years before manufacturing ended, as had SUVs and small cars.

The T6 Ranger and its Everest SUV sibling remain the hard work of designers and engineers based out in the Blue Oval’s Melbourne headquarters.

In 1998, one-tonne utes like the HiLux enjoyed 10 per cent of the total market. By 2008 that was at 14.5 per cent, rising to 18.5 per cent in 2018 and now it's at over 21 per cent. Systematic jumps, but at an increasing rate over the past five years.

Probably the most profound change since then in consumer tastes is the rise of the premium ute versions. The expensive ones.

Ford found a cash cow to rival any past money spinners like the historic Fairlane luxury car with the Ranger-based Raptor, charging over $80,000 for the original that offered plenty of upgrades but no performance benefits until this year's redesign. Toyota and Nissan quickly followed suit with their own flagship one-tonne utes, raking it in as well.

Meanwhile, the left-to-right hand-drive re-engineering of the full-sized American Ram 1500 has been seismic, breaking well past the $100,000 barrier, followed by GM SV's Silverado. Huge trucks. Huge money. Huge profits.

Is Australia developing American tastes? You bet.

Propelled by travel restrictions and the sharp uptake in 4x4s, caravans, boats and other recreational vehicles, their success has paved the way for the Ford F-150 and Toyota Tundra from next year.

Is Australia developing American tastes? You bet.

Punishing Holden to oblivion

Anyway, five years on from the final VF Commodore, it's easy to see where Holden went fatally wrong from the weary perspective of 2022.

Australia's long association with large cars should have been a red flag for General Motors, when it announced the shutting down of Holden manufacturing in December, 2013.

However, it instead elected to concentrate on replacing the Aussie VF with the closest approximation of one available – a mildly modified version of the coming Opel Insignia, imported from Germany, but wearing Commodore badges, for 2018. Front-drive. Four-cylinder engines. Five doors and not a V8 in sight. The tabloids had a field day.

It's as if Holden as well as the Australian car industry never existed.

With Buick's support for its Regal version, Holden even convinced Opel to engineer a V6 because that's what it believed Aussies would return to in droves. But instead, the ZB Commodore, though a fine car, was ignored by consumers while hated by traditionalists demanding the resurrection of rear-drive V8 performance models like the Commodore SS and ute.

Was Holden striving to recapture a bygone Australian era with the ZB Commodore?

Despite seven decades of large-car domination in this country, how could GM not work out that our tastes had changed so dramatically?

Some 95,000 VT Commodores were sold in 1998, but only 10 years later, the crucial next-generation VE barely cracked 51,000 units. By 2018, combined old VF and new ZB Commodore numbers barely hit 9000 – a catastrophic outcome, considering the 23,700 units sold the year before.

Australia’s long association with large cars should have been a red flag for General Motors.

Would Holden have had a chance if, instead of an Opel, it had managed to rebadge a rear-drive, Camaro-based Cadillac CT-5 sports sedan that approximated the VF Commodore's dimensions, outputs and driver appeal?

Probably not, as Kia is all too aware. The large car market today is currently at just 2513 units, with the Kia Stinger – probably the closest car the world now has to the VF Commodore – leading the Skoda Superb 1942 to 571 sales. In contrast, in 2018 when ZB launched, it was at 15,400, compared to 115,000 in 2008 and 217,000 in 1998 – around the time Holden started putting together a business case for the VE.

Miles away from meeting actual consumer tastes in Australia, Holden was in a perfect storm right until GM pulled the plug on it in 2020.

The ZB Commodore, though a fine car, was ignored by consumers while hated by traditionalists demanding the resurrection of rear-drive V8 performance models.

No Australian jobs to protect

It's worth noting another thing that's changed since 2017, perhaps affecting large cars more profoundly than any other category, is the demise of obligation.

Without Australian manufacturing, the various government agencies' ‘Buy Australian' requirements evaporated, and since most Commodore, Falcon and (particularly) Camry sales were fleet-driven, there was simply less incentive for consumers to choose sedans.

Furthermore, in related developments over the past two decades, what was once simply a company car as part of a salary package became a user-chooser salary-sacrifice choice for many people, prompting a big shift away from mainstream sedans to something more premium and, especially, SUV-shaped.

Rewarding Ford

Seeing the writing on the wall with large cars, at least Ford Australia was following Toyota's lead by burying Falcon forever and instead getting completely behind Ranger, literally, after taking development lead with the global T6 program nearly five years before its shutdown announcement in May, 2013.

Actually, Ford narrowly avoided falling into Holden's trap, as it had embarked on a Falcon replacement program during the mid-2000s that would have included spinning off several US models including a Lincoln and even the Mustang that eventually became the 2014 S550.

Seeing the writing on the wall with large cars, at least Ford Australia was following Toyota’s lead by burying Falcon forever.

However, clearer minds prevailed. Painfully for Australians and fans of Falcon, this VE-style Falcon rebirth was binned, but through 2022 eyes, it was brilliant foresight, given Ford is still present in this country.

Now accounting for over 80 per cent of all the brand's volume in Australia, the T6 Ranger and its Everest SUV sibling remain the hard work of designers and engineers based out in the Blue Oval's Melbourne headquarters.

SUV for Victory

SUVs aren't new and their inexorable rise as off-road ready 4x4s have enchanted Australians since the first Land Rovers landed in the 1950s.

But the modern SUV era that started with the 1994 Toyota RAV4 and took hold three years later with the Subaru Forester and Honda CR-V of course decimated the medium and large sedan segments globally.

Post Australian car-manufacturing shutdown, the standout SUV performers include the Kia Seltos.

In 1998, out of nearly 808,000 total vehicle sales in Australia, SUVs managed 96,500 sales, for 12 per cent of the market. In 2008, against 1.01 million sales, SUVs shot up to 195,000 sales for a 20 per cent slice. By 2018, in a 1.15m market, SUVs nearly hit 500,000 sales for a 43 per cent share, while year-to-date in 2022, SUVs dominate at 52.5 per cent.

For reference, large sedans are currently running at 0.5 per cent, against 37.2 per cent during the VT Commodore's heyday in 1998.

Post Australian car-manufacturing shutdown, the standout SUV performers include the Kia Seltos, Toyota RAV4 Hybrid and even Nissan's ageing Patrol, which has seen a resurgence partly because buyers won't wait years to get the sellout Toyota LandCruiser equivalent.

Supply cannot keep up with demand.

SUVs aren’t new and their inexorable rise as off-road ready 4x4s have enchanted Australians since the first Land Rovers landed in the 1950s.

EVs: 1, weekends: 0

In the 2019 federal election, then-PM Scott Morrison infamously campaigned on the back of rejecting EVs as they were out to spoil our weekends.

Subsequent bushfires, floods and COVID-19 made sure of it, perhaps prompting Australians to later reconsider a lower-carbon economy more seriously than the LNP had.

In 2017, out of 1.19 million vehicle sales in Australia, just 1124 were electric; to the end of September this year, that number soared to 21,771. That's 2.7 per cent of the market, against under 0.1 per cent.

It was Tesla and its weekend-enhancing long-range batteries that seduced Australians when the affordable Model 3 sedan landed in 2019.

Nissan tried with the first Leaf in 2012, as did the BMW i3 two years later, but it was Tesla and its weekend-enhancing long-range batteries that seduced Australians when the affordable Model 3 sedan landed in 2019. Hyundai, Kia, Polestar, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BYD and others are now cashing in the EV mania sweeping this nation. Waiting lists for most are long.

And these numbers are high despite there being no EV utes or trucks as yet. Labor's federal election win earlier this year was just the fillip EVs needed in this country.

The future is electric, and Australians are living for it.

The future is electric, and Australians are living for it.

China to the rescue

Year-to-date, over 82,500 vehicles sold in Australia were made in China. For the whole of 2017, that number was just 4680. In five years, Australians have really taken to Chinese vehicles.

They have had a lot of help from rivals. Since 2020, established carmakers like Toyota, Suzuki, Mazda and Volkswagen have jacked up prices substantially, abandoning the sub-$20,000 light-car/supermini segment and sub-$30,000 SUV classes almost altogether.

Aussies, it seems, still have a taste for low, low prices.

Result? This has left the field clear for MG, GWM/Haval, LDV and others to swoop in with cheaper alternatives, especially in the wake of severe used-car-market shortages.

No matter what we think of the way some of these models drive or behave on Australian roads, the fact is Chinese brands are offering grateful consumers viable options to tired old second-hand tat that currently cost way too much.

Aussies, it seems, still have a taste for low, low prices.