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C'mon! Admit it! It's so obvious! Take a look at
a 1957 Chev, then take a look at an FB or EK Holden. Hmmm... funny,
there seems to be a bit of a similarity. Yeah, funny about that!
In the 50s and 60s the Holden was never really
"Australia's Own Car". It was always just an off-shoot
of the American-owned General Motors company.
These days there is plenty to like about an EK. Maybe you can't afford $20k for a nice looking '57 Chevy, but you can probably afford to get a good FB or EK for less than $6k. They do up really well, with a decent coat of paint they look like magic. The 138 engine can be beefed up, but the engine bay is well suited to the installation of much larger engines. A stock EK with those Nasco bits like the spats, venetians and taxi-bar, is an automotive icon of an era long-gone, a mobile museum. Or a lowered, chopped, hotted-up EK beast is the ultimate head-turner, all those curves and chrome.
Unfortunately the FB/EK didn't share all the mechanicals with the Chevs. The FB/EK Holdens didn't have any V8 option like their American cousins. They were stuck with the tired old 1940s-vintage 138ci Grey Motor which had to lug all that excess steel and chrome. Consequently in 1961 the EK with Hydramatic transmission was the slowest Holden car ever made.
At the time the modern styling of the first 1960 XK Ford Falcon had it all over the dated-looking FB. Not only did the FB not even have a bonnet lock, it had no option for an automatic transmission. In fact it looked deadset stale. 1960 was also the year that treasurer Harold Holt introduced a hefty sales tax on cars. With the FB/EK model, the miracle of Holden's market domination was changing. People were no longer accepting the manufacturer's spec. They were buying cars loaded up with options.
More than any other Holden model, the 1960 FB and 1961 EK owe virtually all their styling inspiration to the Chevy's of 1955-57. The styling was a blatant and shameless grab, ripped directly off the Chevs and transformed into a Holden. Unfortunately for Holden by 1960 and 1961 the styling of these cars was several years out-of-date, and it showed. These days that regressive styling of the FB/EK is actually a large part of its appeal - the FB/EK epitomises that period when excessive metal fins and huge lumps of chrome were in vogue. But by 1961 it definitely wasn't in vogue.
The similarities are all too obvious.
Check out the similarities between the EK and the '57 Chev: the tailights embedded in those crazy tall 'batfins'; the radiator grille full of grinning chrome; the protruding headlights; the teardrop shaped roofline and rear windscreen; the shape of the doors; and that savage wrap-around front windscreen.
And don't forget the 1959 Ford Customline; there's also an embarassingly similarity to it as well. The same wrap-around windscreen, protruding headlights, grille style, etc.
Another Chevy copycat.
So you thought that sounded familiar? That jingle was originally a Chevrolet jingle, which GM-H lifted beautifully straight out of the United States for export to Australia as "Football, Meat Pies, Kangaroos and Holden Cars". Australians were so blind then, we were told what we wanted to hear and we ate it up.
The New Nationalism of the post-war era was such a marketable commodity and you gotta give full credit to GM-H, a foreign multi-national that did a supreme job of milking Australia's post-war national pride for all it was worth. Right from the beginning in 1948, the original Holden 48-215 was simply a remodelled Chevy, based on a long lost 1938 Chev that'd been gathering dust in Detroit.
When the very first Holden was being developed in the 1940s there were two camps. The 'Project 2000' camp, and the '195-Y-15' camp.
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Holden had been pretty gung-ho about producing its own cars in Australia, but Lawrence Hartnett, the General Manager at Holden's, had a hard time convincing the Yanks in Detroit to allow him to proceed. In his impatience he sought the assistance of the Australian government who were eager to promote local manufacturing after the war. Later Hartnett observed that the American bosses in Detroit probably didn't like him. Maybe they thought he was a bit of a socialist, being so chummy with the Chifley government? The American GM management were incensed when they finally found out about Project 2000, apparently nobody had told them. They kicked out Hartnett, 'shelved' Project 2000, and went ahead with their own Australian car project, the 195-Y-15.
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The Australian/American design tug-o-war went ballistic with the next model and was reputedly responsible for creating the HD disaster in 1965. The HD was the American-approved design and became next Holden after the EH. While it does look pretty stodgy, it was the alternative to the proposed Australian design, the EF. I've seen the EF prototype and if you ask me the HD was the lesser of two evils because, relatively speaking, the EF looked extremely crook - damn plug ugly. In reality neither the EF nor the HD could ever have hoped to follow in the footsteps of the EH. By 1968 a used HD was worth less than an EH.
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