{"id":7922,"date":"2017-09-19T10:32:26","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T00:32:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=7922"},"modified":"2020-06-20T00:37:20","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T14:37:20","slug":"holden-the-day-for-closing-is-coming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/australia\/holden-the-day-for-closing-is-coming\/","title":{"rendered":"Holden: The Day For Closing Is Coming."},"content":{"rendered":"

Holden<\/strong>, along with Toyota<\/strong>, will cease to manufacture cars in Australia. But how has the process leading up to that day been handled, what about the people involved? Private Fleet<\/strong>‘s Dave Conole had a one on one interview with the head of PR for Holden, Sean Poppit<\/strong>. This is part one of a two part story.<\/p>\n

With Holden stopping manufacturing in Australia, wh<\/strong>at has been the process to wind down making cars up to the final day?<\/strong>
\nOctober 20 is the final day of production and we\u2019ll continue building cars up until the final day and it will be full speed up until that point. Let\u2019s say we\u2019re doing 170 cars per day, we\u2019ll stay at that figure right until the final day. Obviously that day won\u2019t be a full production day and we\u2019ll hold a private employee only ceremony at the plant to mark and honour our heritage and our people.
\n What is being done to support the workers across the factories?<\/strong>
\nAt the plant in Adelaide we\u2019ve got just under a thousand workers there. One of the things that has been ABSOLUTELY non-negotiable from us, right from the outset, have been what we call the transition services and the transition centres. Our HR and manufacturing teams have won several national, and in fact, global awards for the quality of that work.\"\"
\nWe\u2019ve got a full time transition centre set up at the Holden Vehicle Operations which is at our plant in Adelaide. We\u2019ve fully decked out the bottom floor of one wing and that\u2019s a dedicated, permanent , centre to assist people in getting new jobs or be retrained. We have independent people from many industries, government support including the military, people from the private sector like engineering groups…it\u2019s been a benchmark piece of work and it\u2019s something we\u2019re justifiably and extremely proud of in the way it\u2019s helped and continues to help people transition.
\nUp until this chat we\u2019ve had an eighty percent success rate, meaning eighty percent of those that have left Holden since 2013 have found or gone onto new work, while that other twenty percent have either gone into full time study or chosen to retire. So it\u2019s been an amazing success rate which I think is a testament to what we have in place to helping our people transition AND how eminently employable our people are.\"\"
\n That\u2019s some really good news for the people involved, yes?<\/strong>
\nAbsolutely. Not just in the north of Adelaide but in Adelaide itself Holden was seen as a job for life. It\u2019s a great place to work, really fair pay, you get to work with a brand you are passionate about and get opportunities to move around the plant and do different roles. There\u2019s lots of long term employees and we know it (the change) can be daunting to re-skill and re-train which really is the reason for being, these transition centres.
\nHowever there will still be roles for current employees, right, in places and roles such as Lang Lang or in research and development?<\/strong>
\nTrue. We\u2019ll become a vehicle importer, engineering, and design centre and we\u2019ll still have the second largest dealer network in the country. Our corporate HQ will remain here at Port Melbourne and there\u2019ll still be our team of 150 designers as part of the international design studios and yes we\u2019ll retain the Lang Lang proving ground (south east of Melbourne) and the 150 engineers on site there. What that means is there will be somewhere between 350 to 400 designers and engineers working on local and international products as well as the hundreds of people in the corporate side, sales, marketing etc.\"\"
\nWith the new Commodore on the way, how does Holden see the vehicle being received?<\/strong>
\nWe ran a drive day at the proving grounds earlier this year, with the next gen Commodore. We had the V6 and four cylinder version. We had a dozen Commodore customers there. I\u2019ll be up front, we had a couple of them come up and question why they were there, saying yes they were keen to see the proving ground but didn\u2019t have a lot of interest in a front drive Commodore.
\n(It\u2019s here that Sean shared some quotes from those that attended.)
\n\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have considered this car, now I\u2019d even consider the two litre, never mind the V6.\u201d
\n\u201c I\u2019m really surprised at how well it gets the power down, it feels quicker through the corners than expected.\u201d
\n\u201cThe new Commodore is really impressive, I particularly like the V6 model with the all wheel drive, even the two wheel drive model is not bad and very quick with the turbo.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s going to be on us to present the car in the right way, we don\u2019t imagine for one second it\u2019s going to have the same emotional and nostalgic appeal. Our sales numbers, we don\u2019t expect it\u2019ll sell in the same numbers the locally built car did. But what\u2019s critical, and what was reinforced to us in a pilot program we ran recently…. what we want is for people to drive the car and understand that Holden magic, what made the Commodore so great, there\u2019s a very, very big streak of it in this new car. Rob Tribbiani<\/strong> (Holden\u2019s legendary chassis engineer and the driver of the Holden ute that set a record at the famed Nurburgring<\/strong>) is super excited about the all wheel drive V6 with the adaptive dampers and tricky real differential system, is a real belter. We just want the car to be driven and judged on its own merits. http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/offers-credit-card\/ren-drive-365-credit-card.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Holden, along with Toyota, will cease to manufacture cars in Australia. But how has the process leading up to that day been handled, what about the people involved? Private Fleet‘s Dave Conole had a one on one interview with the head of PR for Holden, Sean Poppit. This is part one of a two part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[227],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7922"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11341,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922\/revisions\/11341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}