It’s not uncommon to see a Commodore here in Australia gracing a bowtie. This tradition has been around for a while; I’ve seen it fitted on Holdens for as long as I can remember. So this VF didn’t strike me as too out-of-the-ordinary until I noticed where its steering wheel was positioned. That’s probably taking the fanboi thing a bit far.
You will be familiar with our greatest expatriate (after Margot Robbie of course), Ed Stembridge’s Chevrolet SS festooned with Holden Commodore badging. But not even Ed chose to switch driving sides.
I’ve seen a LHD Captiva parked in this same spot, with similar callout on the rear window. Naive me thought someone had loved their car so much they brought it with them when they were posted in Australia for a sojourn, but I finally managed to solve the puzzle.
Sitting in the driver’s seat of this SS one day was a gentleman, very reluctant to get out of the car. I motioned him to maybe roll down the window and he finally relented. Inquisitive me started asking questions but he just was not interested in the conversation. All I could get out of him was that he was a drivetrain engineer for General Motors. I wanted to tell him about CC, Ed Stembridge’s SS and share the love, and maybe get some juicy inside gossip in return, but he shut me down with nary a flicker of interest.
That’s cold, man.
Further Reading
Sadly, not everyone working for automotive companies bring a passion for automobiles to the job. This individual may prefer spending time in the office writing control software and considers time in the car an unavoidable burden in supports of his primary duties.
If so, people who see his unusual ride and then want to “talk cars” represent just one more reason he prefers desk time to seat time.
But he ought to be a bit more accommodating, if only in support of good PR practices.
GM policy probably forbids their engineers from talking to people for fear of leaks and stuff. And if the guy is working he probably didn’t want to be disturbed.
He’s possibly grumpy that he has been stuck with the LHD SS – for a car that is now out of production, I doubt that any development work is taking place!
I will have to ask my brother in law if he had any funny experiences driving development cars. I remember that he had a challenge with fitting a GMC Yukon 2-door in the narrow inner-city streets and parking where they lived at the time.
Yes, he’s certifying the dead, apparently. More like a coroner. No wonder he was cold.
@Dave Skinner I think you’ve nailed a big chunk of it—corporate policy or no corporate policy.
I can relate to the guy’s frame of mind. Before I quit faffing around with old Darts and Valiants, I found it very gritching to be in the middle of trying to diagnose and repair a problem and having random people come up and want to strike up chit-chat about the car. Sometimes it was “Slant-6!”, sometimes it was “My aunt/grandma/dad”, and sometimes it was “Ew, I guess we forget how stinky exhaust used to be, don’t we! Haw haw haw!”. Didn’t matter which variety it was; I was working and trying to concentrate and did not wish to socialise.
I’ve had the same experience with BMW test drivers here in Munich. Some were nonplussed while others were so hostile when I took photos of the prototypes covered in swirled camouflage.
My good friend’s father is a senior mechanical engineer at BMW Forschung und Technik centre. Whenever we talked about any cars, ANY cars, he shut down and dodged us. It needed not to be about the classified information from the Oz Room, for the love of God.
Here’s the latest photo I took of next generation BMW 8-Series on loose in Munich. This car is HUGE in person!
Holden built export Chevrolets arent exactly rare in NZ way back in the 70s we got the Australian built Chevrolet 350 a rebadged Statesman and Constantias new here sold via Chevrolet or Vauxhall dealers not Holden, Lately Ive seen a few Chev badged Commodores around but wearing all the foreign market badging not just a bowtie on the grille, nothing LHD yet though, I must take more notice.
Interesting! Given that our US market LHD cars were manufactured there, perhaps it was a test unit? I seem to recall there were a certain number of production cars reserved for GM.
At any rate, folks here love to talk about the car (I do). In fact, I met a guy last week who had bought some vintage Apple IIgs kit from me and we spent more time talking about the car than the computer gear. When I popped the hood and pointed out the LS3, his first reaction was, “No way! Did you install that??”
Another interaction involved an actual GM employee, who walked up and said he recognized the SS badge, but not the lion. Told him it was indeed a GM product and the light bulb went on when I said “Holden.”
I’m coming up on my first full year of ownership, so look for an update post in April.
I think he was under instructions not to discuss his work, but he could have been reticent because of the possibility of negative sentiment towards the cessation of manufacture being sprayed upon his self.
Is the big “Left Hand Drive” sign on the back somehow required there? Old RHD cars are allowed here without any special identification. In fact Mrs. JPC would love a RHD car because she hears better from her left ear and conversations while driving would be so much better for her.
I think its a hangover from the days when LHD was not fully registrable. I suspect there’s also an aspect employer duty of care in the mix.
Old LHD cars are allowed here too, but I suspect that it is a condition for new ones. They typically have “engineering evaluation vehicle” signage too.
I’ve seen a reasonable number of vehicles like this, usually GM. I think the last one was a Malibu.
“Traditionally” guys would put a Chevrolet badge on their 1970s Holden if they had fitted a Chevrolet engine (the 350 was available up to 1974 or so), and this continued with 1980’s Commodores when it was ‘easy’ to convert legally or at least legal-ish.
This returned with the LS1 engine from 1999 on, without the need to convert from the Holden V8, plus the badges from export variants were available.
IIRC, anything before 1989 is game for keeping LHD. After that, it needs to be converted to RHD. 1989 is where the AU stds changed.
That will change in the next 2-3 years with some interesting twists.
Oh yes? What’s in the offing?
Look here:
https://infrastructure.gov.au/vehicles/mv_standards_act/
The most interesting bit is the rolling 25 year exception. It means I could import a 3rd Gen F-Body or a C4 ZR1 w/o having to convert to RHD
Thanks! I’ll be sifting through this to see if they’ve been thoughtful or careless with regard to lighting regs.
I forgot about the proposal to allow high-end LHD cars that aren’t made in RHD. Not sure if this will extend much beyond things like the LaFerrari, but I can’t see it applying to things like US pickups or even Camaros.
Pre-1989 is relevant to ‘modern’ imports, there is a difference in how making cars compliant for Australian registration are dealt with. I might be wrong but in most states cars more than either 25 or 30 years old are treated as historic and don’t have to be converted to RHD.
For a number of years, LHD cars were permitted to be registered in Northern Territory, South Australia, and Australian Capital Territory due to large influx of military and diplomat personnel.
Lately, the states have loosened up the regulations in the past twenty years about allowing the classical cars to be registered as left-hand-drive. It’s very similar to the 15-year (Canadian) and 25-year (American) exemption.
I can’t list everything here because the states have their own regulations dealing with left-hand-drive vehicles. One noteworthy item is South Australia forbidding ANY modifications to the LHD vehicles be it installation of air conditioning or modern radio.
Victorian plates. There is your answer!
I once ran into an Aussie GM enthusiast at the General Motors building in New York back when they displayed their latest and greatest in the lobby. It was the 1980’s and one of those cars was a 3rd-gen Trans Am. Since I owned one at the time, it became a topic of conversation.
Seems he owned one as well back in Oz, and he explained to me the pitfalls of importing an American car, one of which was a mandatory left-to-right conversion, and the different ways it was handled, including leaving the brake master cylinder on the left side and using a bell crank to actuate it from the right-side pedal. Holdens are sold as Chevys in LHD regions like the Middle East, and earlier Commodores started out as Opel/Vauxhall designs, so they’re engineered with such flexibility, but apparently US GM cars are not.
If you recall, it’s also the reason Nissan’s hottest Skyline models were not exported to LHD countries as the platform apparently could not be easily converted from RHD.
“leaving the brake master cylinder on the left side and using a bell crank to actuate it from the right-side pedal.”
Many RHD Japanese cars in the seventies extended the throttle pivot off to the right over over the transmission hump to the “normal” pass through point to the engine bay. This allowed them to use the same engine bay throttle linkage in all markets.
I had a ’73 Corolla with this setup, and one of my high school buddies figured out he could use slip his foot up behind the dash on the passenger side and then work the throttle as he pleased. It made for a couple of white-knuckle moments when he applied power as I was slowing for traffic…
The poorer conversions would leave the steering column cut off under the dashboard and connected to the right-hand one via a chain, bicycle-style!
If you recall, it’s also the reason Nissan’s hottest Skyline models were not exported to LHD countries as the platform apparently could not be easily converted from RHD.
Well, in the late 1990s, one Finnish guy took up the challenge of converting his R32 Skyline to LHD as to appease the angry gods of Finnish DMV. Henri Helanto used to have a website, documenting the conversion process. He had to fiddle with the exhaust system as to clear up the space for steering box.
Ever since, other guys felt inspired to do the same for their Skylines. It’s easier to do now with the 3D scanning, CAD, and 3D printing, etc.
The story gets weirder. I found this mentioned on another site. Chevrolet offered a Holden badge package as a $250 option for the SS.
That was only for the ’14-15 VF models. The VFII grille is a bit different, and GM never updated the kit. I had to order all my bits from one of the several vendors in Oz who cater to the Holden expat market. There’s also a guy here in the States that can reprogram the radio and HUD to display the Holden (or HSV) logo on startup.
Don, good luck trying to make a D&R talk to you, much less with the certainty of whatever he says landing on the interwebZ. As in fat chance in hell.
This is likely a Holden development vehicle, not much to see here. The stickers are a government requirement.
It seems obvious that nothing was rebadged or converted on the car you saw. It came of the assembly line (there in Australia) as a Chevy (for export) and became an engineering mule.
About the LEFT HAND DRIVE sticker…
In 1987, I travelled with a group through Outback by coaches. When we alighted in a town somewhere in South Australia, I noticed a very unusually high number of American vehicles with LEFT HAND DRIVE stickers.
I queried the tour guide whether there was a military base nearby. He was astounded and looked at me quizzically, ‘How do you know? It’s supposed to be SECRET. You’re the first one to mention that.’
It turned out to be Pine Gap surveillance base, which was supposed not to ‘exist’ at time of my visit.
Teehee! Not too many secrets in Woomera, which is where you would have been, near to the Nurrungar base (now closed). Pine Gap is the large US base 1100ks north, near Alice Springs, our contribution to The Empire. (Plenty of us wish it wasn’t, because it makes little ol’ Oz the nuclear target it probably isn’t otherwise, but I digress).
I remember the area at about the time you mention because it wasn’t just that the cars were LHD, they were all American barges, looking not so much like fishes out of water as the fishes who swallowed it all. (Extremely dry around there). Like you, for a car spotter it was like being the only one who could see a sign saying “US BASE HERE”