- Messages
- 328
- Likes
- 32
- State
- Non-US
- Country
- South Korea
Ever been to a fancy-dress party where two blokes have both turned up as Superman?
There are a couple of things wrong with this, starting with the fact that you've just found yourself at a fancy-dress party. And second, two delta-males trying to be the same thing at the same time is never going to end well.
Odds on there'll be tears, starting with failed attempts to use X-ray vision to guess the colour of the hostess's knickers. That'll be followed by the sound of ambulance sirens as one wannabe superhero takes a swannie off the roof of the chook shed, trying to prove that only the real Superman can 'fly'.
But just to illustrate that the motoring industry really is no smarter than a couple of half-tanked tax accountants, take a look at what's going on here. Forget baggy spandex and broken elbows, but when you break it right down, what we have here is the Kia Stinger and the new Commodore ZB turning up at the same party. And they've both come as the next VF Commodore.
Okay, so we all know that a successor to something like the VF SS-V Redline will probably never exist, but in the meantime, both the Kia and the new Holden are sniffing around the ruck to pick up the rear-drive-Commodore crumbs.
The Kia, as the cleanskin, probably has less at stake, because it'll attract its own followers regardless of any sense of tradition, imagined or otherwise.
For its part, Holden freely admitted to MOTOR that it knows the new ZB will never sell as well as the VF, nor will it ever attract the same quorum of default buyers who bought a succession of Commodores over a succession of decades. But don't be fooled by such frankness; both these cars have a job description that involves ? among many other things, admittedly ? luring VF (and Falcon) owners in for a look-see.
Ironically, it's the non-Holden Kia Stinger that probably makes the most convincing case on paper. It's rear-drive, just for starters, and that must surely be one of the big talking points for those staring at a lease-is-up VF or FG-X in the driveway. The Stinger isn't a V8, of course, but at least with a pair of turbos bolted to the 3.3-litre V6, it makes the sort of power that local-V8 owners can relate to.
The ZB? Er, not so much. Yes, it's a V6, but packaging constraints mean that there's no hairdryer on board. And while it isn't front-drive, it isn't rear-drive, either, and the best Holden could come up with was to install all-wheel drive onto a platform that was essentially a tail-dragger in its purest form. And the Holden ? despite what the contrived engine cover suggests ? has its engine mounted east-west to prove the point.
And guess what else? Neither of these cars is actually a sedan. They do their best to look like sedans (and the Holden is a bit more convincing) but the fact is that both are five-door liftbacks.
That said, they're both quite handsome cars, although we reckon the ZB is a bit less obvious. That long snout on the Kia could, if you were the cruel type, be described as a bit try-hard. Nor is there a single manual gearbox option to be found anywhere within the Stinger and Commodore ranges and while that's a reflection of 2018, it's also an oversight for any carmaker trying to rope in an old-school car guy (or gal).
So if we're not talking traditional performance sedan values, what are we dealing with when the stopwatch appears?
Read more on Which Car.
