You don’t have to be a car enthusiast to associate Holden with the peak of Australian motoring.
While the homegrown icon has sparked generations of fanatics that keep the Holden name alive, this online group of Commodore owners are speaking out against an influx of Australians invading their community, but not in the way you might think.
An admin of the Facebook group ‘Commodore Collectables’ recently went viral online after they advised new group members that the online community wasn’t for Holden Commodores, but for a vintage electronics company that shared the same name.
“There’s been quite a few Australians joining the group recently. This is a reminder that the group is about Commodore computers, not Holden Commodore cars,” the user said.
The original post went viral on numerous social media platforms and attracted over 10,000 likes, while inviting a range of humorous responses from most Australians who shared their love of the iconic car.
One user wrote, “We like football, meat pies, kangaroos and Commodore 64s. I think that’s how it went”. A different commenter said, “To be fair, it does seem like the kind of mistake a Commodore driver would make”.
Another Facebook user stated, “Only post I ever saw of this group, and I immediately burst out laughing. My dudes, you made my day”.
Commodore International – the parent company – started as an electronics company in the Bahamas in the mid-1970s and was largely known for the global success of the Commodore 64 and Amiga computer line throughout the 1980s.
However, a key executive of the brand told UK-based industry body BCS that the collapse of the Commodore brand was due to tumultuous leadership.
Despite selling “just a tad under 27 million”, David John Pleasance, the former Commodore Managing Director, told BCS, “They [Commodore executives] used to stumble from one crisis to the next”.
“There was a huge number of changes in senior management, and every time somebody new came in, they had a different view.
“The problem was, after Jack Tramiel left [the founder of Commodore International], none of them had any knowledge of the computer business. There was a guy from Coca-Cola and a guy from the steel industry. They had no idea about the computer market, and they never tried to learn,” Pleasance explained.
Closer to home, Holden closed its Australian chapter in 2017, with the final locally built Commodore rolling off its South Australian production line on October 20 that year.
Despite closing up shop eight years ago, the Holden Commodore continues to be a popular model among Australian buyers. Unfortunately, its popularity also extends to car thieves who target the Aussie icon due to the relative ease of bypassing the car's security system.
As previously reported by Drive, the homegrown classic tops the list of the most stolen cars in Victoria, with 1497 Holden Commodores stolen between January and December 2024.
If you want to know the full story relating to why and how thieves target the car, visit Drive's previous story here.
Ethan Cardinal graduated with a Journalism degree in 2020 from La Trobe University and has been working in the fashion industry as a freelance writer prior to joining Drive in 2023. Ethan greatly enjoys investigating and reporting on the cross sections between automotive, lifestyle and culture. Ethan relishes the opportunity to explore how deep cars are intertwined within different industries and how they could affect both casual readers and car enthusiasts.
