2017 Holden Commodore SSV-Redline Wagon
It’s taken him a few years to admit the old car wasn’t going too go much further. He’s made the decision and hasn’t held back – bright green, heaps of grunt and room for a journeyman to load his much loved drums.
Dave has finally got a new car and after inviting him to do a guest post on his new “Green Machine”, I’m grateful he accepted. You just can’t go past a high performance V8. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. – RD
The Old Car 
We’ve owned a Ford Falcon BA XR6 Turbo for about thirteen and a bit years. It’s been a good car, except for the consumption of two gearboxes and nearly having to replace the turbo. It was starting to make what I assumed were potentially expensive noises, so I started looking for another car. To the old Falcon’s credit, it lasted the two years it took me to find what I was looking for.
I’m a drummer and packing drums in and out of a sedan wasn’t quite as enjoyable as stubbing your toe on a rock.
I wanted something that was easier to load and unload. The Ford XR6 also went quite well with 240 kilowatts – about 320 horsepower for gentlemen with more life experience.
I took a couple of SUV’s for test drives and was a little underwhelmed by both the performance and the fact they look like a 4 wheel drive but are clearly not a 4 wheel drive. One test drive was a Lexus RX 250. Nice, but an expensive “smaller” SUV and unfortunately so hopelessly under powered, I thought I was going to have to get out and push it up a hill on the test drive!
Disappointingly, I gave up looking for a car for a couple of years.
The New Car
I’ve had a bit of a secret love affair with the Holden Station Wagons. I loved the shape and design. Recently, they’d released a new colour which I loved !
Turns out it’s called Spitfire Green. Interestingly, its not a colour I’ve associated with any Spitfires in the Battle of Britain. I thought maybe it’s a bit of a joke?
Here in Australia, we have these quite nasty caterpillars that congregate in gum trees. If you accidently touch one, you get harpooned by small spikes that are very tricky to remove. If, however, you step on one, their inside stuff gets out and it’s a very bright green colour. There you go!
Out of the blue in November 2017, I thought I’d visit the local dealer to see if anything took my fancy. As I walked through the dealership, avoiding making eye contact with the salesmen, I rounded a corner and there it was ! A wagon ! And it was my favourite colour – Green ! Big wheels ! Big brakes and blacked out bits ! It was beautiful !!!
Then I noticed the small badge on the front – LS3. Whoa! That’s the new 6.2 litre V8 ! 304 Kilowatts of V8 goodness – about 407 horsepower!!!Love at first site !
I left the showroom thinking I might’ve finally found a new car. It wasn’t cheap though. All those goodies come at a price. And getting that expenditure past the Minister of Finance might be tricky. I buttered her up telling her how nice it looked and what a colour! She decided to come with me to have a look. She loved it too!
We then asked a sales guy if we could take it for a test drive. He said “No”. WTF !
The Finance Minister took him to task and he handballed the whole test drive question to his Boss. The Boss was a nice bloke who could see his days were numbered if he said “No! ”. After considering his future and his wife and kids, he said “Yes”. But it was going to have to be a week later as the green machine was parked in by numerous other cars also awaiting new owners. The scene reminded me of those windows in the streets of Amsterdam, but the cars are girls and the owners are paying for a different sort of “Test drive”. Anyway, I digress… We went away looking forward to a test drive in a week’s time.
The Test Drive
We arrived at the dealership and discovered they still couldn’t get the green machine out of the parked-in chaos of the showroom, but they had exactly the same model in a more accessible spot that we could take. It was black and looked good. But not as good as the green machine!
The test drive was all a bit tentative as I wasn’t sure about the car. If it wasn’t for the seatbelts everyone would’ve been ejected through the front windscreen the first time I applied the brakes! I never gave it a great deal of boot as it was a new car and I didn’t want to appear to be booner. Interestingly, it has a thing called a bi-modal exhaust. Effectively a solenoid that turns on the growl in the exhaust.
Mental distraction prescription de viagra canada Mental distraction is found helpful for delaying things by many people. Steroids are believed for leading to tadalafil 20mg for sale some degree of effect on your body but can only be bought in half the price. Imagine Lovemaking Session in New Ways Do not let ED be the center of attention in your tadalafil 20mg tablets relationship. Information on erectile dysfunction Erectile dysfunction basically purchase viagra online straight from the source is a disorder which embarrasses a man very badly.
Turned off, it purrs like an executive class car. Turned on, with a bit of throttle, it sounds like a cranky dragon! At least that’s what I assume a cranky dragon would sound like. The roar is quite intoxicating. Love it!
The car is also very well appointed with colour head up display, satellite navigation, forward collision alert, lane departure warning and blind spot alert; amongst the usual extras.
We decided to buy it !
The Shopping Spree
While in the showroom we saw a sedan in the same glorious green, but it had the windows tinted. That just added cool to the looks and was added to the bill. I wasn’t that overjoyed by the standard 19 inch wheels. They looked a little ordinary and just failed to please the eye, not appearing to fill the guards enough. I talked to the Finance Minister and we looked at another car that had the optional 20 inch wheels, which looked much better. They were also added to the bill.
Then came the question of what to do with the old XR6. While we both loved the old car, it was getting on and was looking a bit tired. The front bumper was scratched and didn’t fit well anymore, one of the boot lid struts anchor points had broken away from the body so the lid was very dodgy to raise and lower, the interior roof trim had lost its glue and was now held up with sowing pins and the paint on the roof had started to fade. My love for the old girl had blinded me to the facts and so I thought I could sell her for about $8,000. Oh dear…
When the reality of the situation was explained to both of us, after a week or so of thinking about what to do, we decided to take the easy way out and trade her. For $1,500. Poor old girl!
We organized to pick it up the new SS Wagon on Tuesday week as I was away with work the next week and they needed time to put the wheels on, do the tinting and a general clean up.
Picking up the car
Didn’t sleep much on the Monday night. Just like a kid on Christmas Eve I was way too excited for that. We went down about 11am and saw the car parked outside the showroom ready to be driven away by the proud new owners! I looked at the windows and thought “That tinting doesn’t look nearly as dark as it did on the other car in the showroom”. I was a bit disappointed that maybe they’d used a lighter tint than what was on display.
We went into the showroom to sign numerous forms and hand over lots of money and I mentioned (hopefully) that maybe they hadn’t done the tinting yet. The sales guy, Bill, said “Oh yeah, that was done” then looked at the manifest, which included a line which said ‘Tint and Price’, and that seemed to confirm it for him. Then he said, “ I’ll just go and check” and went outside leaving us at the sales desk. A few minutes later he came back very apologetically saying “Sorry, it hasn’t been done. We’ll have to sort that out!”
I was very happy. Not because they had forgotten, but because it was going to get darker. I was worried that maybe that was it… I booked in it on the following Friday to have the tint done and they gave me a brand new SV6 wagon to drive for the day. I don’t want to disparage the six cylinder version but there was a major difference between the cars in brakes, suspension and amazing power. But the SV6 did get me around for the day.
After a quick demo of the features of the new SS Wagon, which I forgot as soon as I drove out the gate, we were away. Very nice car to drive.
It’s now three weeks later and due to one thing or another we only have 600 kilometers on the clock. When I have a bit more experience with the green machine I will post a review.
Parked away from everyone else on the first outing ! – Dave
If you enjoyed this post, we would love it if you would share it with your friends and head to our home page and enter your email address and subscribe to manstheory.com. You will receive notification as we post additional articles and we really look forward to you being a part of manstheory.com.
