Five countries 'Aussie' Holdens actually come from

Friday, 7 September 2018

Holdens are no longer built in Australia, but they are built in many different countries around the world. So where exactly is your Holden from?

Holden pushed itself as 'Australia's own car' for most of its history, something that is now coming back to haunt it with the end of Australian production seeing the company having to import all of its models (as opposed to 'most of them' which is what it did since the mid-1980s).

Holden now has a truly multi-national line up, so today we take a look at five countries (well, four countries and one continent) that Holdens come from.

North America

The Acadia SUV is all American. All that chrome may have tipped you off.

The home of Holden's parent company, General Motors, will be the source of the upcoming new large SUV, with the Acadia being built in Springhill, Tenessee (where they actually consider it to be small).

* Five SUVs that are really cars underneath

* Five cars that aren't made where you think**

The Astra hatch is made in Poland, while the wagon comes from the UK and the sedan is Korean.

But there is another North American member of the Holden family that is already on sale - the smaller Equinox that is built in San Luis Potosi and Ramos Arizpe in Mexico.

And, yes, Mexico is part of North America, despite Donald Trump's best efforts…

The Equinox is also built in Canada and China but, so far, ours only come out of Mexico.

The previously all-Aussie Commodore is now sourced from Germany.

Poland

Holden made much of the fact that the new Astra was produced in Europe when it launched here and even more of the fact that it won the European Car of the Year award (a full year before it was actually launched here, that is).

And, indeed, the Astra is very European, with our RHD hatch being built in Gliwice in Poland, while the wagon version comes out of Ellesmere Port in the UK.

Like most utes sold in New Zealand, the Colorado is built in Thailand.

There is an odd-one-out in the local Astra line up, however, with the sedan coming out of South Korea - it's actually still called the Cruze everywhere else.

Germany

Ah, Germany. The spiritual home of the Holden Commodore. Yep, really - the original VB Commodore was based on the Opel Rekord E, the six-cylinder version of which was the Opel Commodore.

So, really, the current Holden Commodore being a rebadged Opel Insignia, built in Russelsheim in Germany, is something of a homecoming for the Aussie icon.

Along with the Trax, Barina and Astra sedan, the small Spark is built in Korea.

Of course, the recent purchase of Opel by the PSA Group (Peugeot/Citroen) does throw a problematic gallic wrinkle in the Commodore's ongoing future. Not to mention its less than stellar sales…

Thailand

Thailand is the country that is the supplier of the vast majority of utes sold in New Zealand. So, of course, Holden's offering in that segment is sourced there as well.

Rolling out of the Isuzu plant in Sumat Prakan in Thailand the Colorado was originally a rebadging of the Isuzu D-Max, before increasingly going its own way with different engines, interiors and (some) exterior styling.

The Colorado-based Trailblazer SUV (formerly the Colorado 7) is also sourced from the same plant.

An appallingly bad thing when it first launched, Holden has performed literal miracles to get the Colorado as competitive as it is today.

South Korea

'Holdens are all just rebadged Daewoos!' the angrier, less well-informed may well cry about Holden's South Korean sourced product.

Except the problem with that is that Daewoo Motors hasn't existed in any form for close to two decades now and even the name has been gone for seven years.

GM bought Daewoo's assets after it went all financially wobbly in 1999 and created GM Daewoo in 2001 (along with Suzuki and China's SAIC), which was an entirely new company that was renamed GM Korea in 2011.

Currently Holden sources the Astra sedan (Cruze), Trax, Spark and Barina from a number of different GM plants around South Korea.