Is this the ‘car’ Holden should have replaced the Commodore with? NZ4WD Editor Ross MacKay has a bob each way.
Look, as a fan for as long as I can remember, of what these days is officially called the (let’s see now) Virgin Australia Supercars Championship, but which most of us still think of simply as ‘the Aussie V8s’ I can understand the dilemma Holden faced when they were forced to phase out local design and assembly of the iconic Commodore.
Ford? Not so much, because though the company also lost its key, signature ‘Aussie-made’ Falcon model in the huge global shuffle which effectively turned their market upside down and inside out, the Blue Oval had already plotted an escape route with its plan to – for the first time in the model’s 50+ year history – produce its iconic Mustang in RHD.
Given how important the Virgin Aust… (pah!) the Aussie V8 series is in terms of marketing across the Tasman (as a mate who used to work for Ford there told me once that on a visit he ‘chaperoned,’ his American guests could not believe that Aussie fans had the Ford or Holden logos ‘tattooed onto their bodies’) you would think that GM would have followed suit with the latest Camaro.
As well as having some real and still relevant heritage of its own (via iconic local tyre shop franchisor Bob Jane's ’69 Trans-Am version) the latest ‘Transformer-style Camaro was actually designed by an Australian.
Yeah?
However, somewhere deep in the buttoned down world of corporate marketing some bright spark decided that there was still plenty of life left, both in the Commodore name tag, and the ‘big car’ market sector.
Ironically that decision probably kept the Holden name in the Aussie V8 series – albeit with a car which, in its most basic form – is front-wheel-drive and doesn’t come standard, anywhere in the world, with a V8 engine…
It was a move which utterly polarised the Australian market with Commodore sales dropping from a high of 44,387 in 2009 (the last of 14 years the model was Australia’s best seller) to just 9000 last year.
The really sad thing in this whole wretched scenario is that – as a car – the new fully-imported ZB is actually rather good. It’s just that like our market here the Aussies are mad for TD DC Utes, and SUVs.
Which – finally – allows me to introduce the subject of this Driven feature this month, the Holden Acadia AWD.
Having finally jemmied one out of the local distributor and spent a week using it as my daily driver (and weekend drift car towing iron) I’d have to rate it as one of the best family-size seven-seater AWD SUVs available here.
While not as ultimately tough and therefore off-road/NZ4WD reader-suitable, say, as Ford’s Ranger-based Everest, Toyota’s Hilux-based Fortuner or – indeed – its Colorado-based sibling the Holden Trailblazer, the Tennessee, US-of-A-built Acadia has such a broad bases of capabilities it really is – in my humble opinion – the model that should have inherited the Commodore nametag.
Familiar Territory!
Think of it, in fact, as Holden’s belated-but-pretty-much-spot-on replacement for Ford’s BA Falcon-based Territory. Then close your eyes and imagine it with a Commodore badge. See what I mean?
For all its success on the track over the past 40 years, Commodore was always seen as the ‘everyman’s knockabout’ model across the Tasman and here. The car, station wagon or ute you could drive to work on Monday after carting the kids to Saturday morning sport and to the beach on Sunday.
It was this very same demand for a single vehicle to – literally – be all things to all people which saw pretty much every other mainstream manufacturer follow Jeep’s original lead and create their own SUV models – at the ultimate expense of what buyers in our neck of the woods used to call ‘The Big Aussie Six.’
That the Acadia is a far superior product even to the ‘best Commodore ever’ the final Aussie-built VF is a given of course.
As I have already experienced with similar product from Jeep and RAM, US design, spec and assembly standards are now truly world class.
Bit of a mixed bag
To look at, Acadia is a bit of a mixed bag, as if marketing rather than the art department set the design brief... starting with a list of ‘must-haves’ like ‘a clamshell bonnet,’ ‘big grille,’ LED-trimmed ‘Angry Bird’ headlights, ‘high waist-line,’ and ‘squared-off wheel arches’ with plenty of room in those arches to show off the (in the case of the model I drove) 20-inch alloy wheels and chunky 265/65 profile tyres.
What it isn’t is a ‘classic’ or ‘timeless’ design, though in its defence there’s a brash kind of ‘modern American-ness’ to the look of the thing which does grow on you with time.
The view out once inside is where the Acadia really scores in my book though. With a deep floor, high-ish ‘ceiling’ and ‘swing-a-cat’ wide cabin there is a very real sense of room in every direction – despite what is usually a space-minimising mix of heavily tinted side windows and black-on-black (leather) seats and upholstery
To be fair, there is bugger-all room for luggage if you are going to be using the two extra seats (which make up the seven) in the back row. But fold ‘em down and there is what I would define as a ‘fair old’ amount of room for a family holiday load (suitcases, chilly bin, and smaller sporting items like boogie if not full surfboards!).
Spec-wise Holden has your every need (wants too, I’d imagine) covered with a nice smooth but definitely ‘grunty’ (and isn’t that a naughty word to use in today’s sanitised, politically correct environment) 3.6 litre V6 engine mated to one of these new multi-‘gear’ (nine-speed) automatic transmissions that help you surf both the torque and power peaks.
Features I’m not 100 percent convinced of like Stop/Start and GM’s proprietary Active Fuel Management (which effectively ‘retires’ a couple of the (six) cylinders when you are cruising along under low engine load conditions) technology are also part of the hi-tech suite of electronics you get.
Without a hitch!
So too are a couple of beauties like Hitch Guidance with Hitch View which lets you use the reversing camera to line up a trailer hitch (and keep an eye on the trailer as you are driving – brilliant!) and Traffic Sign Recognition.
Drive modes (if you buy an AWD model) can be selected ‘on-the-fly’ via a rotary dial adjacent the ‘gear lever.
Thanks to Holden (or rather Opel’s) Flexride electronically adaptive suspension and driveline control system ride can be tailored from smooth and what I would call pillow-like to firm and sporty.
Speaking strictly personally here I would like to see a 500kg higher (braked) towing rating because I think 2000kg is borderline for someone, say, who wants to regularly tow a horse float or modern closed MX bike or even Kart trailer. But that might require quite a bit of re-engineering as well as heavier-duty dampers on the rear because I found when I was towing my drift car around though the weight didn’t change the attitude of the Acadia (which still sat nice and flat) the rear shocks felt a little underdamped even on relatively smooth surfaces.
Overall though I quickly got to like Acadia. And on balance I think it is as close to a perfect replacement for the Commodore as you are likely to get!
