End of the caravan-towing Commodore

COMMENT

The announcement that Holden, a company once Australia’s favourite automotive brand, will soon quit selling passenger cars and only stock market darlings – SUVs and trade utes – came as something of a shock to me.

We’re at the point now where we will soon have to replace our tow vehicle, a faithful second-generation Land Cruiser Discovery that doubled as a mobile Simpson Desert expeditionary camp when it wasn’t hauling boats for thousands of kilometres.

The Land Rover has done us well – that is, apart from a litany of bizarre electrical glitches, a cracked head at 130,000 kilometres and a spontaneously exploding safari window – and it’s time to move to a more practical tow vehicle.

But what? I like conventional cars – our driveway and garage are crowded with them – but my future is looking like it will be filled with big, heavy lumbering front-drive-focused vehicles and stiff-legged, uncomfortable workhorses, not the slick sedans and wagons I’m keen to shop for.

Also read: The last great Aussie tow tug

Holden isn’t alone. Apart from the sports-honed Mustang and the city-friendly Focus, Ford is little more than the Ranger trade ute company. Nissan shed its showroom of passenger cars apart from the GT-R and 370Z performance coupes years ago in a cull that has thinned the range to become exclusively SUVs and the Navara trade ute, despite greenwashing itself with the all-electric Nissan Leaf, a passenger car that’s outsold four to one by its least environmentally friendly model, the V8 petrol-only Nissan Patrol.

Somehow, Toyota has defied the trend away from passenger cars with the once locally made, but now fully imported Camry. The four-cylinder, V6 and hybrid-engined sedan range still commands a 76 per cent share of the mid-size car market, so far this year outselling the European-sourced Holden Commodore three to one.

Why do I want a passenger car over an SUV or trade ute?

The first reason is the availability of engines. I like diesels for their ability to lope along with a boat on the back, tapping a deep well of torque when needed and supplying some surprise and delight at the fuel pump.

But when looking at long-distance tow rigs, Nissan, Holden and Toyota all try and put us behind the wheel of big, thirsty V6-engined petrol-fuelled products built for markets where fuel is still stupidly cheap by Aussie standards. If I buy something bigger and heavier than a traditional passenger car, I want the benefits of diesel.

Then there are dynamics. To pick an old scab, both the locally made Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore were built tough for towing. Point them at the horizon with the level riders jacked up tight and they’d eat up the kays. Take the boat off the back and the rear end would still soak up the lumps and bumps of the road with refinement, not bounce, shake and shudder like the modern-day unladen trade ute.

Passenger cars corner flat, steer well, grip mightily – all attributes that high-riding SUVs and trade utes fail to replicate. After all, you spend almost all of your time behind the wheel with no load on the back, so why compromise with a tow vehicle that struggles with the basic task of behaving like a passenger car for almost all the time you’re behind the wheel?

I don’t want a front-drive model such as a V6-engined Toyota Camry, and while it does have advantages, I don’t want or need all-wheel drive. Whatever will replace the Land Rover has to be rear-drive.

Then there’s the environmental impact all this new heavy metal will have. I’m no Greta Thunberg, but vehicle emissions are now part of the wider debate.

In 2017 without a single V8 engine in its product mix, Holden had the highest showroom-wide emissions average – 216 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre – of all the brands on sale in Australia.

Cut fuel-efficient passenger cars such as the now fully imported Commodore and the also-soon-to-vanish Astra small car from the mix, and how much will that change? In all likelihood, not in a good way.

Australia’s love affair with SUVs and trade utes pushed our annual improvement in emissions to just 0.4 percent in 2018 compared with 2017, making it the second-smallest annual improvement since the National Transport Commission established its watching brief in 2002.

In the wake of yesterday’s announcement, Holden’s dirty little secret is only likely to get even more murky.

But what does it mean for me? Despite being ideally suited for towing, electric car technology won’t cut it for range if I’m making a 400-kilometre round trip.

As much as I don’t want to, I’m now shopping around for a trade ute. Sadly, it’s not because I want to, but because I have no real choice in the matter.

It’s going to cost me in more ways than just dollars and cents...