Wednesday, 19 February 2020

Holden cars

will no longer be/people prefer an SUV.
Yes, it does rhyme.
More seriously the "iconic" Holden is apparently not  going to be produced any longer. It comes as no surprise. The manufacturing plants in this state closed some time ago.
As a kitten I remember "Holden's" on the Port Road. Back then it was a "real traffic jam" if you happened to be trying to get somewhere when there was a shift change. I don't know whether we would look at it like that now but we children were always amazed by the sight of what seemed like thousands of men pouring out of the factory gates. In reality it was probably only hundreds but it was a very big workforce. Get a job there and you had a job for life back then. Men worked there for their entire working lives. All that went long ago. 
Things moved to the north, to the satellite city named after Queen Elizabeth. Men still thought they had jobs for life, indeed many of them did.
But things changed. Asia industrialised. The unions here priced the workforce out of contention with their ever increasing demands for "better wages and conditions" while Asia used (and often still uses) what amounted to almost slave labour. 
The federal government started to prop the industry up, a loan here and a loan there...more money and then more money. The unions kept flexing their muscles. It became more and more expensive.
And then something else happened too. People began to want something different. A standard Holden car was no longer the thing. It became possible to buy not just the rival Ford but many other sorts of cars. Vehicles like Mitsubishi and Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Kia, Lexus, Audi, Subaru and many more became much more readily available. There were all the 4WDs that people seemed to think were essential for merely suburban driving.
A friend of mine at university had a 4WD. It was a battered thing which had done a lot of serious travelling on rough terrain. He retained it simply because, as a mature age self-supporting student, he couldn't afford to replace it with anything else. He was not impressed by people who bought the same sort of vehicle with no intention of doing more than a limited amount of suburban travel.
If C.... was still alive I am sure he would be saying that the loss of the Holden is as much to do with the fact  that people have bought themselves a "Land Cruiser" as the cost of manufacturing it here.
I had to go past the local high school the other day just as school had ended for the day. There were no less than eleven of those huge vehicles picking students up - students who could probably walk or ride home.
No wonder the Holden car has ceased to be produced. 

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