Going Native - Holden, Opel and Vauxhall

Australian Holden, German Opel and English Vauxhall formed General Motor's three-pronged, multi-continental push for world domination

1902 Opel Darracq
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Feature Article from Hemmings Classic Car

April, 2008 - Jeff Koch

It's easy to think of General Motors as a purely American phenomenon. You think that building cars with foreign nameplates on American soil, a quarter-century-old phenomenon this year, is new? Guess again: GM has had solid footing in Europe since the 1920s. GM is truly a global power--thanks to names like Opel, Vauxhall and Holden, the General's got outposts all over the world.

Unlike Ford, GM didn't just march in, set up shop and start building existing product on foreign soil. Rather, they opted to utilize names that had already built up solid reputations in their home countries. An expensive way to go about it? Perhaps. But General Motors didn't just cozy up with any factory that presented itself for a buyout. Beyond these companies' locations in strategic areas where GM had little or no reach previously, each had built solid, desirable cars (or in one case, bodies) for at least a decade before the offer to buy was made. General Motors wasn't about to saddle itself with a charity case.

All three companies had incorporated in the 1800s, starting off in very different fields. Adam Opel AG began in January 1863 in Russelsheim, Germany, building sewing machines--they turned out more than a million by 1910. Starting in 1887, they built bicycles as well. Scottish engineer Alexander Wilson founded Vauxhall Ironworks, in the eponymous town near London; Wilson's practice came to specialize in steam engines (and later gas-powered ones) for watercraft. Englishman James Holden started a saddlery in Adelaide, Australia, in 1856, and by the early 1900s, his company had moved into repairing auto upholstery; motorcycle sidecar production commenced in 1913.

After gaining some experience with gasoline engines, the first Vauxhall Ironworks car was a single cylinder, 5hp chain-driven runabout, priced at £130. A 1.8-liter Three and a 2.4-liter Four making 18hp soon followed. The company moved to Luton in 1905, a town that Vauxhall still calls home. The 1907 12/16 featured shaft drive and ran the RAC and Scottish Reliability Trials, becoming the first car ever to complete 2,000 miles without an involuntary stop.

Vauxhall was considered a sporting marque in its early days. A 16hp, four-cylinder two-seater was available in 1909; within a year, a four-liter, 22.5hp model cost £485, and could reach 75 mph. The Russian royal family had a preference for the marque in those days, and the company maintained a shop in Moscow for them. Vauxhall built nearly 2,000 cars during the Great War. A 25hp Vauxhall D-Type took King George V across Flanders to Vimy Ridge; another Vauxhall was the first to cross the Rhine River after the Armistice of 1918. By 1922, the D-type and the larger E-type both acquired overhead valve engines; the 4.2-liter engine produced 120hp.

Vauxhall was selling in excess of 1,400 cars per year in the 1920s--a fair number for a high-end machine--but the company still wasn't in a strong financial position. In the mid-1920s, General Motors commenced the search for a manufacturing facility in England; Vauxhall was quick to make itself available. The price? Roughly $2.5 million in 1925 dollars.

Opel's first car came in 1898; it was built to the designs of German motoring pioneer Freidrich Lutzmann. But compared to contemporary French machines, the first Opels were awkward to operate and look at, and only a few dozen sold in two years. The car works was closed and Lutzmann was dismissed, but the notion of building a car did not disappear.

Two years later, Opel signed an agreement with Darracq, of France, to supply bodies and local distribution in Germany; both parties benefitted, and just two years into the agreement Opel was confident enough to build its own chassis and engine as well. Cooperation ceased in 1906. By 1912, Opel had weathered a factory fire, ceased making sewing machines, and built its 10,000th car. Heavy truck production allowed the factory to flourish during World War I.

In 1923, at the height of the economic turmoil that followed the Great War, the Opel brothers were convinced that a low-cost car for mass production, rather than the luxury specials whose market had dwindled to nothing, was the way to go. The moving auto assembly line had been pioneered in America, but Europe's first working example was Andre Citroën's, created in 1919; by 1922, the Frenchman was spitting out low-cost 5CV/Trefle (Cloverleaf) machines to sate a car-starved France.

The Opels cribbed nearly everything about the 5CV, from the styling to the mechanical layout to the wheel track; it launched in 1924 and, as nearly all were painted green, it was nicknamed "Laubfrosch"--the tree frog. The car was a massive success, helped in part by the stable new currency, the Reichsmark, but it was so close to plagiarizing the French machine that Citroën considered suing; instead, Opel quickly evolved the 12hp machine away from Citroën's. By 1929, Opel offered a range of four-, six- and eight-cylinder models, and was building 250 cars a day with 8,000 employees.

Early on, the Reichsmark offered another benefit to German drivers: The exchange rate and import tariffs were so low, and American cars so technically advanced comparatively, that American iron flooded the country. General Motors not only exported complete cars but had set up a Berlin factory. The company was set to produce locally sourced machines until it was distracted by the Vauxhall purchase.

The Opel family proposed a sale; Alfred Sloan liked the idea of affiliating with an existing company rather than starting fresh in a new market, and GM took a majority of Opel stock in 1929, completing the sale in 1931. Total cost: $66,724,000--not nearly the bargain that Vauxhall was, but then again, Opel was in a much better position.

Not long after Holden's company started making motorcycle sidecars, it started fitting bodies to horseless carriages. During and just after the Great War, trade restrictions forced the company to start production of complete body shells and, in 1919, a new division called Holden's Motor Body Builders (HMBB) was created. In less than five years, HMBB was producing 12,000 car bodies a year; in 1924, HMBB became the exclusive body supplier to GM Australia. In 1925, HMBB built the first completely closed cars, and became the single largest body-building operation outside of the United States and continental Europe.

The Great Depression struck all of the carmakers, but HMBB was particularly hard-hit: it went from 34,000 units a year in 1930 to less than 5 percent of that number a year later (only 1,651 units). That year, GM stepped in and bought HMBB, creating General Motors-Holden's Ltd. in 1931.

Volume sales were always GM's goal, and that meant tweaking each marque appropriately. Beyond the Americanesque styling traits that filtered their way through to each marque and model (from the castoff Chevrolet design of the original Holden FX to the baby Corvette style of the Opel GT, with lots of fins, two-tone paint schemes and wrap-around windshields thrown in for good measure), GM's firm but gentle guiding hand showed each marque the path to volume sales.

Vauxhall's 1928 R-type cost £475--not cheap, but an absolute bargain by Vauxhall standards; it introduced the rumble seat (known as the "dickie seat" in England) to Europe. A parallel truck division, Bedford, was established in 1930, when it was no longer economical to import American commercial vehicles; Bedfords were initially based on Chevrolets but became more bespoke as time went on.

The R-Type was replaced in 1931 by the Cadet, the car that really introduced Vauxhall to the mass market. With a two-liter straight-six and a £280 price tag in 17hp form, it even beat Rolls-Royce to market with a synchromesh gearbox. A variety of attractively priced and good-driving models followed up until the war hostilities in World War II, when Vauxhall was designing and later building the Churchill tank at Luton. Post-war, the Velox/Victor/Cresta sedan troika was a hard one to beat in British showrooms.

Alfred Sloan wanted 150,000 Opels per year sold by the end of the Thirties. The company launched a new, simplified range of cars for 1931 with two engines available: a one-liter four-cylinder and a 1.8-liter straight-six. By the end of the decade, the combination of the baby Kadett, the compact Olympia, the mid-size Kapitan and powerful Admiral saw sales totalling only 6 percent short of Sloan's goal. Opels were cheap, solidly built, and offered some technical innovation as well: independent front suspension was introduced in 1934 and spread through the line by 1939 (the Kapitan even had coil springs and a front roll-bar!), while the Olympia was Germany's first popularly priced car to offer the then-advanced design of unit-body construction.

Yet GM managed not to turn a profit; exporting German currency was verboten, so they simply poured money back into the cars. Eventually, the Nazis, not keen on foreign interests owning any of their domestic industry, made doing business impossible, burying the company in paperwork. When the government invited the factory to convert to wartime munitions production in 1940, GM declined and pulled out. A total of 1,300,585 Opels had been built by that time. The irony was that Hitler never used the plant; it wasn't considered trustworthy, in light of its American owners.

By 1945, the Russelsheim facility was all but destroyed, and the Russians took the entirety of the Berlin plant, including plans and tools for the Kadett back home, where it was built and sold as a Moskvitch. Opel production restarted in 1947 with the Olympia, though GM still could not control the company; by 1948, when it was offered back to GM, management wasn't sure they wanted it. But they took it, and by 1953, they were selling at a level of 100,000 units per year. Opel quickly re-affirmed its market position as a popularly priced car offering modern features and distinctive contemporary styling.

The initial Holden factory was finished in 1936 and built American-branded cars; a second plant was started in 1939. Instead of cars, though, timing and circumstance dictated that it built marine and airplane engines, field guns, and aircraft, among other wartime necessities. The war, and subsequent rationing of materials, delayed Australian car production until mid-1948. The resulting model, the 48-215 (known also as the FX), had a 2,171cc four-cylinder, and styling from a rejected post-war Chevrolet proposal.

Coupes, sedans, pickups ("utility" vehicles, or utes) and panel vans were all part of the model mix. It was the perfect blend of comfort, economy, performance, style and value that Australians wanted--though the notion that they hadn't had any new cars in nearly a decade surely helped. A mild 1953 facelift, and a new FJ body designation, made the early Holden a classic in its own time.

Throughout the 1950s, though competition from Ford was always tough, GM managed to come out on or near the top in sales. Holden owned more than half of Australia's automotive market share, employing 19,000 workers by the end of the 1950s. But even once Ford stepped in with the Falcon, and Chrysler came in with the Valiant, Holden stayed strong. The same was not true with GM's other foreign affairs: By the mid-1960s, Opels had picked up a reputation for being solid but dreary, and enough Vauxhalls had rusted prematurely that even later models that didn't deserve it got a bad rap (Ford sales overtook Vauxhall's in the 1970s and has yet to relent).

Both Holden (using American engines) and Opel (with their own line of overhead cam engines) offered sporting variants of their everyday cars; Vauxhall did as well, though they were the exception rather than the rule. Holden even competed in Australia's version of the late 1960s muscle car wars. Up through the early 1970s, Russelsheim, Luton and Adelaide each had their own independent model programs, with little crossover or looking at others' notes. Holden and Vauxhall largely stayed home, while Opel spread worldwide, across Europe and even into England. Which was OK by GM, since the model ranges didn't really clash with Vauxhall's.

An intensive cross-pollenation between marques began more than three decades ago. From the mid-1970s onward, starting with the T-car (Chevette/Kadett), Opel would provide the blueprint for most of GM's rest-of-world models. Styling and engineering would be sorted in Russelsheim, with Vauxhall to be little more than a marketing office and a local factory. Opel dealerships were phased out of the UK starting in the early 1980s; the UK's last proper Opel, the Manta coupe (a car without a Vauxhall equivalent), was on sale as late as 1988. Holden, meanwhile, has New Zealand as its largest export market since 1954, though its models are sold as Chevrolets in the Middle East, South Africa, and a select few Asian nations like Singapore.

In North America, Opels were sold through Buick dealers from 1958 to 1975 (the Opel name continued until 1980 on a rebadged Isuzu); in the early 1960s, Vauxhalls briefly lived in Pontiac dealers. Both brands were meant to keep imports (i.e., Volkswagen) at bay with something just as small, but slightly more conventional. Opel has flirted with vehicles here more recently, including the Cadillac Catera, and now the bulk of the Saturn line is due to be Opel-based (and German-built). Holden didn't make it to the States until 2004, with the controversial, ill-timed, Monaro-based Pontiac GTO revival; it'll try again this year with the Pontiac G8 sedan.


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