I drove a colleague's ZB Commodore (plain white...yuck!) last Friday to a lunch meeting: the interior was rather too "squashed down" in appearance, and very, very bland compared to the VF. The sharply angular and oddly placed switches (following Euro conventions, no doubt) and feeling "cramped" got to me. Bright white LED interior lamps struck me as novel compared to the VF's unremarkable lights. Instrumentation was interesting, but not spectacular. Info centre was very comprehensive, but also very distracting. The drive was barely over 60km (not even to 100km/h either), but just that was enough to send me back lovingly into the comfy SPORTEC seats of my VF! I muttered to myself, "...probably no mystery why people didn't embrace this ugly duckling..."!
I haven't driven one yet, but I've seen from others' that the Calais V Tourer V6 AWD is much better appointed and finished, and nowhere near as bland inside (it is but still a German imposter...). But even with those increased creds and prettying up, people just aren't hooking a Euro car with slapped-on (Australian) Commodore badgework, which was part of the problem from the get-go. I think that was the worst con-job they ever tried to pull on an impressionable motoring public, save for the bigger con-job of telling mums and dads back in the early 2000s, that oversized and underpowered gurlytrux (thank you, FORG!) are the way to go for the future, not V6 family cars. Alas, the gullible public fell for the con, and here we are.
