Holden hope for right-hand drive 4WDs from GM

HOLDEN is putting up its hand to engineer the right-hand drive version of General Motors’ next generation of large four-wheel drives to ensure they make it on sale in Australia.

And the chances of that happening appear to be lifting.

Former Holden boss Peter Hanenberger made it clear that he wanted to sell SUVs based on GM’s GMT360 platform here – vehicles such as the Chevy Trailblazer and GMC Envoy.

New Holden managing director Denny Mooney shares the same desire to bolster Holden’s stocks against the likes of the Toyota LandCruiser and Nissan Patrol.

The bad news for both men was that GMT360 was not designed to accept right-hand drive and it is too late in its life cycle for such an expensive engineering proposition to be entertained.

The good news is that GM product czar Bob Lutz has signed off the successor platform, GMT361, to be both left and right-hand drive. The first vehicles based on this platform should be emerging in late 2007.



Mr Lutz confirmed the right-hand drive plan for GMT361 during a visit to Holden last week.

"We are not going to agonise over the business case, we are just going to do it in left-hand drive and right-hand drive," Mr Lutz said.

"If you agonise over it you just never do it, and if we are going to compete on a global scale we have to do everything in right-hand drive and left-hand drive."The prospect of Holden actually working on the right-hand drive engineering package fits right into GM’s stated goal of utilising its global engineering and design facilities more fully.

It’s all part of the same philosophy that has resulted in Holden’s Zeta platform being pressed into international service.

Which is why Mr Mooney is putting his hand up for the GMT361 right-hand drive program: "We’ll probably have some packaging guys working with the North American guys to make sure we get a good package. We know how to do it, we do it today."And it doesn’t end there, he added.

"That’s the advantage to doing this stuff globally. We have a pretty big engineering crew here and as our product lifecycles go up and down the advantage is we can do engineering work on other derivatives," Mr Mooney said.

"If there’s a derivative for Europe or a derivative for North America we can do that right here … as long as we are not busy on our own projects."