Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I have to agree, rugby is a gay sport for those John Hopuanes (don't know how to speel his name, the dude who stichs his fingers up ppl's arse's) out there. F1 rocks (on tonight the brazilian GP, 10x better than the V8's), footy is great and soccer is the world game and there is nothing better than to watch two great teams go at it for 90 min. The comedy festival would've been great if it didn't have Paul McDermet (can't spell his last name either) and tripod finishing off.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE union, not league and you say rugby is the poofs game, what about gay f l? where you can't tackle properly, the players like to bite others balls, and fall over and cry at the slightest touch not like the rugby legends like george gregan, john eales etc
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE that was league, not union union is free of ball biting and fingering other's assholes
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I think everone cares considering all Holden do is put the car together, virtually no R&D because GM does it all for them, I would really like to see how Holden would survive without GM and if they weren't bought out by GM in the first place, would they have made 1/2 decent cars.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Yes no R&D, I suppose all the Holden engineers just do laps of lang lang for the hell of it.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE you know why holden do such little R&D. Cause they have such little competition here in Ausralia that they don't need to keep on improving their car. If there were a free trade agreement then you would notice the amount of money spent on R&D would increase significantly casue the other companies keep on innovating, just changing a bumper here and a head light there won't do much. At the moment the australian public is a bit gullible in believeing that the VY is that much different from the VX
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Yes Holden do need to and do carry out R&D to remain competitive with the market they are competing with. Even thought they dont directly compete with the foreign cars as such, they still do have to compete with companies like Ford, Toyota and Mitsubishi for example. Why do you have the need to criticise them for only changing headlights and bumpers...it is not as if the other car companies in their league don't do the same thing.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE you notice car makers go through cycles...the aussie makers were hit quite hard in terms of R&D when ULP came in as they didnt have the budgets of overseas makers to tune engines for ULP. also notice the BA falcon, which ford simply couldnt afford to get wrong, isn't far technologically off some of the lower end jap and euro cars (and ahead of many american cars) eventually holden will surpass ford, and ford will be back in the dark
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE what are you talking about fool? holden spends millions on R&D, thats why they have one of the best proving grounds within gm. Gm has very little todo with their cars except the engines and transmisisons. all body, suspension, brakes, interior, everything else is done by holden. and they test it all thoroughly before they sell it to the public
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Just casue they have "one of the best proving grounds" with GM means absolutley nothing. GMH has an entire country that likes them (means nothing towards the quality of the car yet more about the heard mentality of our country). Holden are heavily protected by barriers to imports which is why they sell so much, all their O/S competitors cost too much here. This actually reduces the need for Holden to do R&D cause they have a reduced amount of competitors. GM provide basically the same engine to most of their larger cars in the US and here. And out of that list, GMH can only do R&D on the interior and body kit (which i've heard does nothing but just design) as all the other parts are manufactured by other companies who do their own R&D. Also how do you explain the lack of difference in car between the VX and VY's. The only real difference is the body kit. Where are you millions upon millions of dollars of R&D going there
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE There is not a great lack of difference between the VX and VY. Holden do not get the exact same car and put a different bonnet shape as you think. If this were the case, you would say the VT is the same car as the VY. All companies make tweaks and improvements to the cars to improve power/economy/noise/ride/handling etc.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Most R&D goes into the next all new commodore but if you knew anything about how a car comapny works then you would realise that they have to do thousands of kms reliability testing for every new model. as well as crash testing, suspension set up. the new vy had a large amount of time spent in a wind tunel and a imrovement in fuel economy resulted
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE If you knew anything about economics and what i said about the subsidies from the government and local industry pritection, you would understand why GMH can afford to do less R&D because they have less competition. Shows how much you know about how a country works
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE but they want to make the best possible cars they can for the relatively small budgets they have. If they didnt do the R&D then people would have cars breaking down which impacts on the image of the company and in turn affects sales. Its also so tehat people like you might one day realise they make a decent car
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I have said before that for the pricing of the holdens they are good value. More "bang for your bucks" cars really. You get 400bhp for $100k, not bad. I'm just saying that if these kinda protections weren't there such as tarrifs, then cars such as the M5 would cost the same amount as a say a SV300 or something similar. O/S the HSV GTO (Monaro) when put under the Vauxhall name will cost in the UK what the M5 costs here. It goes both ways
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Most (if not all) car companies outsource a lot of the construction of various parts to other companies. Holden is far from being alone in this regard
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE Exaclty, which leaves the R&D left to be done on the engine, body and interior. The engine is not a Holden engine, so the R&D for that is done by GM. What else is left apart from testing and design for GMH to put funds into for R&D.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I don't think its quite that simple. I think complicated things (which are very simple in the big scheme of things when desiging an entire engine) need to be done like for noise, air flow into a commodore bay instead of other cars the engine has, noise and tuning for different fuel etc etc.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I am not a Holden fan as you would have realised but I do realise that they will be behind a $300 000 Euro because of the volume they sell in. For the tiny market, Holden aren't doing a bad job really
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE well by all accounts, holden should acutally be doing better here in australia. using comparative advantage and the size of our economy, australia should really only have two car manufacturers. The market is too over crowded with all four large car companies producing here, it spreads resources too thin and is not really economically sustainable. I can foresee atleast one car company dropping out of their australia operations in the not too distant future. Either Mitsubishi or Toyota. And another thing, something happened the other month that hasn't happeneing in over a decade, the Falcon outsold the commadore. The tides are turning.
Re: AUSSIE, AUSSIE, AUSSIE I reckon the reason why Ford outsold Holden is because they have a majorly revamped model just released, when Holden end the VT/X/Y type cars and start selling the new HFV6 with 5sp auto and new suspension, new V8 etc, they will most likely overtake Ford again.