A General Motors executive has said that the planned shutdown of all Australian manufacturing operations could lead to more vehicles being shipped to the region from South Korea, according to a report from Reuters.
GM confirmed last month that it would cease all manufacturing operations in the country by 2017, citing rising production costs and a strong Australian dollar.
GM’s head of international operations, Stefan Jacoby, told reporters at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week that the closure of the plant in Australia brings “a lot of opportunity”, saying there is “good likelihood” South Korea will begin to ship more cars to Australia, though no official decision had been made yet.
The recent decision to pull Chevrolet out of Europe created speculation that GM would restructure their operations in South Korea, who supplies most of the brands cars for the European market.
GM’s new CEO, Mary Barra, said the company “remains very committed to the Korean market.”
When inquired about whether or not the company is concerned with higher labor costs in South Korea, Barra said “From a competitive perspective it (labor costs) is very important. So it’s something that we continually look at.”
Comments
You haven’t heard much from the Australian’s since the Domino’s started falling!
Piss off Brian you troll!
It’s funny you say troll when someone brings up honest points!
You want me to go away but the only thing that’s going away are those home grown cars you love so much!
I say troll, because that’s exactly what your doing, trolling for a response. I bet you’d be crying into your bowl of cereal if GM said all American manufacturing was going offshore to Korea and China. It just isn’t about the cars you know. I’ve done my bit every car I’ve owned has been from the General and currently I have an SS-V Holden Ute and the folks have a Cruze hatch. If GM said Holden were going to assemble FWD Impalas for the Aussie market I’d still probably buy one. The fact of the matter is this decision puts 2,500 Holden workers out of a job directly and 50,000 in the car manufacturing supply chain. If it was in your country, it probably wouldn’t matter because it is a tiny fraction of the size of your car industry, but here it has killed it and in the process GM and Holden will lose half their market share in Australia alone. So yeah, the cars are one thing and the whole world should be sad because the affordable RWD that the common man like me can afford is D E A D dead. More importantly though think of all the people who are affected by this change as they are the ones that really matter. It really is the end of an era, and to see a company with nearly 150 years of manufacturing history in this country fall on its sword the way it has is an absolute crying shame. So next time write something constructive instead of trying to get an angry reaction out of Aussies.
Zero Five your government in Australia needs to take some of the blame. How many countries have totally free trade regarding autos? Most countries have tariffs to protect their domestic industry. In addition the USA have unique safety standards not shared by the rest of the world. Then there are differing emission standards. Many countries require local content in one form or another. Others like China have ownership limitations to protect local industry. Most countries have gotten creative as to how to protect a domestic industry. Like it or not the Aussie government is partly to blame for creating an environment to deter local production.
Louisf, seems as though you have no idea on how the Australian automotive industry really is. Australia has the LOWEST tariffs of ANY automotive manufacturing nation, and also have free trade agreements with many countries which also produce motor vehicles meaning that they can bring cars to our shores without having to pay any tariff at all. The Australian government assisted as much as they could, even when they had to borrow money from other countries to do so. The current Australian government has NOTHING to do with why tariffs are so low. That can be traced back to the Hawke Labor Government of the 1980’s and their “Button plan”. This plan was meant to mean that Australian made cars would be better, but instead all it did was open up the shores to cheap imports such as Hyundai, Great Wall, Geely, Ssangyong, Kia, Daewoo, Chery and many others.
GM PROMISED that Holden would continue as a manufacturer until AT LEAST 2022. They have since reneged on this and I hope that they are taken to court for a breach of contract and made to pay back taxpayers’ money (a small chunk of it MY money!).
In future, GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT!
Ok I really hate dealing with you hard headed people but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to! Kinda like buying cars from north Korea and China! Ding ding ding!
See I give you brain dead people so much crap because you are not true die hard GM fans! I am threw and threw!
So the q’s is are you a GM fan? If so then you should be ok with a GM car no matter where it comes from!
I have only purchased GM cars in my life, some are made in the us others are made from different countries around the world!
Aaron your points support exactly what I am saying. I might not know Australian politics as well as you do, but the bottom line is that having no tariffs or no other protection for the domestic industry, you have a flood of imports from counties with lower costs.
Whether or not the current government created this mess when previously in power or not, what is it doing now to turn this mess around? Nothing that I am aware of. While most other countries devise creative ways to protect its domestic industry, your governments, current or recent, have not come up with a plan that works.
So Louis let me ask you if you know the Australian government is a main reason that production is leaving Australia then why are they so mad at GM?
Do the Australian people just expect GM to eat the bill that the Australian government wouldn’t provide?
Have people forgotten that ford is also pulling out (giggity) of Australia and I don’t hear even a fraction of the belly aching about that just how bad GM has fucked the Australian customers!
Brian, at least Ford are keeping both their design and engineering capabilities, you need to Google ‘Lang Lang Proving Ground’ and see what GM are throwing away. Our cars here will go backwards without this important facility as our roads are the worst in the developed world. The Western Highway for instance, the main interstate between Adelaide and Melbourne, two capital cities is a 2 lane highway for most its length, has numerous ‘sinkholes’, potholes and blind bends that have B-Double (short roadtrains) that hurtle past at 60 mph constantly. Locally tuned Holden’s and Fords are the only cars that handle these abhorrent conditions with ease like no globally tuned platform can. Hell, we even drive them flat out down corrugated dirt and gravel roads at 70 mph like a pickup truck and they take that sort of punishment with ease. Most imported cars would shake to bits or worse spin out and probably hurtle straight into a big fuck-off gumtree. Come over here and sample some cars to form a proper opinion before you spin bullshit about things that you don’t understand. LouisF, I agree our government didn’t do enough, however this goes back nearly 30 years when under the Button Car Plan the Hawke Labor Government began reducing tariffs and gave our industry virtually no protection whatsoever. Combined with stupid free trade agreements which sometimes aren’t even reciprocal I’d say our governments both Liberal and Labor have made the biggest monumental fuckup you could possibly imagine. We are isolated and vulnerable, particularly in a hostile situation such as a war. Who is going to make all of the aircraft components, shells, army trucks, guns, tanks and boats now that GM and Ford are pulling out? They did in WWII and we were so lucky to have that industrial power, or else we’d be eating with chopsticks. Now its gone we have to rely on our allies in Europe and the US who are tens of thousands of miles away. Lucky you aren’t president Brian, you’d probably love seeing us taken over by the Chinese or Koreans seeing you hate Australians so much. As for a lack of loyalty to GM you’d better fly over here and look in my shed. I’m only 27 but my ski boat has a 350 in it, I’ve got a V8 Holden Ute and a ’63 Impala four door hardtop is up on blocks getting restored. If that’s not loyalty I don’t fucking know what is!
You can’t compare to the loyalty to GM I have!
Zero Five I hear your pain. One American who determined your suspension settings prior to 1976 was chief engineer George Roberts. Holden’s sales and profits went into the sewer soon afterwards. After you Aussies indoctrinated Handlingberger, he helped get Holden’s suspension back on track.
Brian the reason Australians are mad at Holden and were easier on Ford was and is because Holden’s Aussies heritage dates back to before Henry Ford was born. After WWII Holden represented Australia’s industrial maturity more than any other product. As Zero Five acknowledges, Holden and its head Larry Hartnett were major players in WWII production.
As for the Senator John Button’s plan, I forgot that it is 30 years old. It puzzled me then and I am still not much wiser now at precisely what he was trying to do.
Brian, majority of GM Authority’s reader base is from America and so you’re not going to see many comments from us. If you want to see Aussies complain, look on GM’s facebook timeline (posts by others) or at http://www.facebook.com/manufactureinaus
Whilst our governments can take some of the blame, you can’t ignore the fact that GM can take blame too. GM complained recently about low tariffs but did they ever tell our governments? No. They demanded more money, which they could have easily run off with. The decision to close Australian operations was inevitable because GM didn’t want us making cars that were better than their north American ones.
Australia is filthy on GM (and our government too) right now and no one will buy the Korean and Chinese crap.
Stevan Jacoby is a wanted man in Australia and his arrogant comments saying that there is a lot of opportunity in the closure of Australian plants and engineering really makes him sound like a #%!%!%$$#@!
So you don’t like Steven Jacoby cuz he lives in this world we call reality and you don’t!
It’s funny you bring up George Roberts LouisF, you sure know a thing or to about Holden and GM history. Although the HQ-J-X Holdens he presided over handled like absolute pigs, the HQ is one of my favourite Holdens of all time particularly in GTS Monaro form! Apparently at the time of his appointment he made a directive to all of the engineering team to make the HQ ride like a Cadillac and plough into corners full of enough understeer to scare an unwitting driver from going into corners hard, all supposedly in the name of safety. It backfired with the motoring media here terribly and many journalists publically criticised the safety and drivability of Holdens tuned to drive in this fashion. Because of it’s incredible styling however the HQ was one of the most successful Holdens produced. I can’t name too many other cars in the world that had so many variants built off one platform. HQ series covered 4-door sedans both short and longwheelbase ( SWB Belmont, Kingswood, Premier & LWB Statesman) , 2-door coupe (Monaro), coupe utility (ute), 1 tonner (a trayback ute) and a panel van. Dad wouldn’t let me have a Q,J or X as my first car because they were a little bit of a handful to drive other than in a straightline so instead we restored a ’77 HZ Premier with a 253 Holden V8. As the first of the large Holdens with Radial Tuned Suspension that Peter Hanenburger with the help of the local engineers refined, it handled like a dream for a then 26 year old car. Regrettably I sold that old girl, she used to look great as I bolted on some factory GTS Rally wheels, incidently the same wheel as Pontiac Rally II wheels off the Firebird I think! Since Radial Tuned Suspension, local Holdens have been known as great handlers that you can throw hard into corners, but also soak up the undulations of our ‘fantastic’ roads, it will be sad for the company to lose the ability to tune both local and imported product for our local conditions. The thought of losing Holden as a manufacturer here could be made all the more bearable should GM keep an engineering side to the business, much like Ford Oz who developed the new global (except for the US) Ranger and Everest. I doubt it will happen though. GM can see huge dollar signs with the sale of Lang Lang and Stefan Jacoby has said that GM already has ‘engineering capability’ in Korea and China. Which begs the question, when was the last time anyone drove a brilliantly handling Korean or Chinese car? Probably never although the Koreans are marginally better. The imported version of the Cruze was proof enough of that. Holden spent 18 months and several million dollars developing the suspension on that car to get it to compete with the like of Golf, Mazda 3 and Ford Focus before the switch to local production. The package was such a great fix GM adopted it for all other Cruzes produced globally but as of now, that capability is shot to pieces with the majority of Holden engineering being laid off before final production in 2017.
Do you know what you do to a ship that is leave port? Yes you wave good bye to it!
Hey Australia start waving!
Brian, the world would have been a much better place if you had’ve been a headjob
I think you mean hand job!
Anyway I guess you don’t like the term reality!
Or maybe it’s just that the truth hurts to much for you to handle!
No I mean’t headjob, that means oral you moron…
You mean blow job! Who in the fuck says head job! Are you kidding me and you call me a moron!
Head job is something you do on a set of cylinder heads!
A Holden Insignia, anybody? Manufactured in the Rüsselsheim, Germany, plant of Opel?
That’s what hints a January 31, 2014 article in Germany’s daily newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (FAZ) about the agreement reached between Opel and the metal workers union.
FAZ wants to have heard from union representatives that not only this famous new Opel car would be manufactured from 2015 on, but also RHD cars badged as Holden or Buick for Australia, pointing to the fact that the Rüsselsheim factory is building Right Hand Driven Insignias for the United Kingdom badged as Vauxhall, and badged as Opel for Ireland and other countries where cars don’t drive on the right side, but on the wrong, er, left side of the street, and thus is already equipped for manufacturing such RHD cars.
For the RHD Malibu, they don’t need Rüsselsheim, those are already built in Korea.