Quote:
Originally Posted by montsnmags
Yes, for some reason some HSV (Holden Special Vehicles) owners occasionally replace the standard Holden badge with the Chevy one. I mean, I know the connection, but I never really understood how this enhanced the car. Not that I'm criticising Chevy, but I don't understand how it's any better than a Holden badge. And it goes against every "Holden family"'s basic ethic - the long term polarised slur against the Ford Falcon (and a "Ford family") was its American-ness (just your usual, insular nationalism, never obscured by little things like facts  ). |
It
could be considered a slur against the States, but only a car guy would get the connotation and said car guy would have to be pretty knowledgeable about things on both sides of the Pacific:
As you may or may not know, cars in the U.S. pretty much sucked for years. There were a few exceptions but by and large, as long as there were people thick enough to believe that badge engineering made the same cars into different ones, GM could (and did) increase market share. Finally, as Toyota, BMW, Mercedes, Honda
et al went from merely stealing GM's lunch money to physically moving in, GM discovered what a lot of American car enthusiasts had known for years: Holden kept many of their better cars rear-drive and capable of performance (as did Opel, another GM sub, in Germany) with no real difference in reliability. So, 15 or 20 years too late, GM's North American VP (a former Marine) got fed up with the bureaucratic crap and brought the Monaro and Commodore over here. The Monaro got a Pontiac grille and became the GTO, one of the most revered names in American automotive history. Awesome car (if a bit on the portly side), performed great, good reliability...and everyone here bitched because it handled too well and didn't have fake hood scoops. The Commodore became the G8 which got rave reviews even though under the skin they're pretty much the same car, then GM got rid of the Pontiac division entirely because they're idiots.
Anyway, The cars were so great that the above-mentioned VP swore he'd keep them around, most likely as Chevys; the Monaro becoming the Impala (another hallowed name) and the Commodore becoming (probably) the Caprice. Neither one happened, the VP retired, GM's selling off Opel(!) and we still have front-drive granny-mobiles except the Camaro which at this point I really can't get all that excited about. So that's the significance of that car having a Chevy badge on it; a LHD version of it almost existed but never did because of bureaucratic pinheads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by montsnmags
Mind you, when the SsangYong Musso came out in Australia, some of the owners who bought it with the Merc' diesel in it replaced their front and rear badges with Merc badges. I can understand that Merc' might be considered a better vehicle manufacturer than SsangYong, but I'm pretty sure that anyone who knew it had a Merc' engine in thought this owner-rebadging pretty tragic, and anyone who didn't know wondered who the owner thought they were fooling. I think that car was definitely a "Clarence".
Cheers,
Marc
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I had to Wikipedia that one...looks like something Isuzu would sell over here. I've seen that type of behavior before:
