8 days without any postings....and weeks without seeing a ZB on the road

[vs-lover]

Lidia Sarks (Toyota Girl) is simply gorgeous. She can come over with a new Toyota anytime.

 

[vs-lover]

I’d nearly bet the reviewer wouldn’t have a clue

How fresh out of modelling school is this one. She so reminds me of Frog (Sally Field) in "Smokey and the Bandit" with that wedding dress on sprouting crap out of her mouth but knowing nothing.

And as VS5.0 says she needs to get off the paint as she's not back in the 1970's where every model slithered all over the paintwork like a cat on heat.

 

[Badgerdog]

You guys might like this model better...we're still talking about cars, right ?
https://www.carsguide.com.au/family/holden-commodore-rs-liftback-69470

 

[figjam]

Agree. Fresh and new, but really needed a lighter, brighter colour to bring out the shape and highlights.

 

[Badgerdog]

Agreed. That model looks very good but you'd have a really good ride to be sure

 

[HZ Hero]

I have a VF, my wife's car is going to be replaced and the ZB might be the one. It also has a bit of power. They don't make the VF any more so you either get used to the ZB or look at the Japanese/Sth Koreans.

 

[Badgerdog]

That's the problem right there. With Australian manufacturing of Ford and Holden gone and Chrysler gone from N.Z. now and shortly to stop distribution in Australia ?, if you want a decent medium / large sedan at an affordable price with good performance and handling the options are now very limited. I looked at the Kia Stinger but the seats are very tight and I really don't want the long term maintenance and reliability issues twin turbo engines are generally notorious for. The updated Camry looks half reasonable but still to "cardigan" like with its power and handling for my liking. I probably should have tried out the Mazda 6 but after driving a ZB Calais V I didn't feel I needed too.

I think GM did very well to get another 20 kw's out of the 3.6 engine and with the 9 speed auto also able to extract the best out of the motor and taking into account the lighter weight than the VF2 and the AWD and torque vectoring the V6 powered ZB is a good performance / handling machine.
Not super quick but a good balance of ride / handling / performance / technology and pretty fuel efficient as well.

I wanted to move on from my 5 year old Chrysler SRT8 which has an urban fuel consumption official rating of 20.5 L / 100 km's (drinking 98 Octane) which recently hit $2.60 a liter in New Zealand, (you can possibly relate to why) and there's not a huge amount of choice these days. ZB was the best of a very limited choice in that price range.

 

[Brettly-2008]

Time will tell. Certainly the Gen3 engine with its piston slap was poxy and drank oil like a fish and Australian build standards were very low compared to the current German built one.

To be fair, it was only the very early LS engines such as yours that suffered poor tolerance issues. The latter versions (Gen 4 onwards) were/are great engines and quite refined/economical for something so big and with such performance potential.

I really can't take any four or six-cylinder seriously as a 'performance' engine -maybe a Honda NSX or Jaguar XJ220! But having said all that, I'd love a ZB Calais or RS in my driveway. Got no problem with ZB as a car, just mainly its price... oh and its name!

 

[Badgerdog]

I must be jinxed with GM engines then. Sold my last Calais in 2002 mainly because of the Gen 3 engine issue and worrying oil consumption and have owned FPV's and a Chrysler SRT8 since. Got this Calais V on 20 December 2018 and was really enjoying it till early this afternoon, only done 850 km's and not even a month old and its started idling really rough, so rough I decided to head straight to the Holden dealer but I didn't make it there... 2 km's later it stopped and can't restart. Hopefully its just some electronic gremlin / teething issue but worryingly no engine caution light came up on the dashboard so who knows.
Didn't have to wait long for the problems to start... The "joys" of owning a Holden eh...
List of issues now is
1. Car only came with 1 key
2. No 2019 GPS map available at time of delivery
3. Stopped for no apparent reason after running extremely rough.

Maybe I should have stuck with my thirsty Chrysler SRT8...

 

[commodore665]

I did in another thread, our NZ cops don't seem to like em, at least not when you have to try and get a big guy in the back seat who's been uncooperative...

you are correct , some say they are under powered compared to the previous Commodores too .