Twists & turns in the world automobile ride

I was sharing some car stories with a friend, telling him about the worst and best cars I’d owned or driven. We both were lamenting the loss of the Holden, a great servant of the Australian motoring public and although a product of the giant US General Motors Corporation, it was a vehicle that many saw as our own. I am not going to wax lyrical on Holdens or attempt any sort of history of them but it is generally accepted that the car, that became known as the Holden, was born in the late 1940s, at the end of World War II. At this time, the undisputed manufacturing centre of the world’s car manufacturing was the US and so it was unsurprising that General Motors threw their lot in with an Australian company to build cars here. In those days, the United Kingdom was the second biggest builder of cars in the world, but their main contribution to our car industry was to export us vehicles generally suited to the British climate. It is also interesting to consider in those immediate post-World War II years that three of the biggest car manufacturers were Germany, Italy and Japan. Countries that had all been on the losing side in the war. And while the American car industry remained dominant for the best part of 30 years, up until the 1980s, it was finally matched by the Japanese with a range of brands and products that became incredibly popular in Australia. They have remained so to this day. My friend and I both drive vehicles that were made in Japan, something that would have been unthinkable after World War II. The world order of car manufacturers has changed hugely since the first Holden rolled out of the Fisherman’s Bend plant in Victoria in 1948. The US giants General Motors and Ford are still in the top 10 as far as production is concerned. And by sheer weight of numbers there are still more cars produced in the US than in Japan. However, in the past 10 years, China has emerged as the biggest car producer in the world. Last year, more than 27 million cars came off their production lines, a number greater than the US, Japan and India, the next three biggest manufacturers, combined. As Bob Dylan said in one of his famous songs, “the times they are a changin ...”