Commodore Berlinaa nice, safe family car

Press, 6 February 1986, Page 18

Commodore Berlina — a nice, safe family car

BEHIND the WHEEL with

Peter Greenslade

If Peter Brock and Allan Moffat, the winners of the recent Wellington waterfront street race, had been compelled to wait on General Motors New Zealand for their Holden Commodore they would almost certainly have had to kiss the prize money goodbye. At least that is the impression one gains from experience with at least one of the other activities of the Trentham-based company. Take for example the six-cylinder Commodore Berlina, which was sampled briefly by some South Island motoring correspondents when it was launched in the third quarter of 1984.

Since then GM’s press fleet has been doing the rounds in the North Island, but it is only within the last fortnight that it has extended its vision beyond Barrett’s Reef and sent a car to Christchurch.

Coincidentally, it has reached here just as the new Nissan-engined Commodores are appearing on Australian roads. These new cars should reach New Zealand about September and in the normal course of events the Commodore Berlina has been around long enough to be dismissed from the minds of motoring writers. As might be expected, the Commodore Berlina is a saloon that is now showing its years. Although the almost antique 3.3 litre inline six cylinder engine has been freshened up by the addition of Bosch LEJetronic fuel injection and electronic spark timing, the whole set-up is by no means as smooth as it could be, when measured against early 1986 standards.

Although the engine always fired up in the mornings, I sometimes felt a little uneasy before it caught alight. Maybe its tardiness indicated that a tune-up would not have gone amiss, although once it had settled down it was never unresponsive. My example was an automatic car. G.M.H has stayed with its Trimatic automatic transmission system for years and, although it continues to do an admirable job, it is not a system that encourages keener drivers to override and manually select a lower ratio as do some of the more modem arrangements, like that in the just-announced petrolinjected, 2 litre Toyota Corolla liftback, for example. The locking device on the T-bar selector lever discourages one from moving the selector out of the “drive” position and, if the lock is disengaged, the lever will slip just as easily back to “first” as it will to “second,” although I would suspect that practice could make perfect. According to the Commodore sales brochure, however, the latest Trimatic system has been recalibrated with the final drive ratio to provide the optimum balance between performance and economy.

Although the Berlina does not perform anything like a Peter Brock Group A Commodore, it will scurry along and hillclimb in a thoroughly adequate manner.

I am not too sure about the other side of the recalibrated Trimatic equation. As I had the Berlina for a relatively short period and probably asked it more serious questions than those the average family would ask, I thought that any reader sufficiently interested in six cylinder Commodore economy would probably get a truer picture by enquiring about it from neighbours. After all, it would be surprising if anyone did not have a Commodore-owning acquaintance close at hand and the odds are that the acquaintance has had the time to get to know the car which, after all, has been around for more than a year. Over the years, various people in G.M. and with G.M.-H in Australia have expounded at length on Holden’s radial tuned suspension. In fact, it comprises MacPherson struts, coil springs, wet sleeve shock absorbers and an anti-roll bar in the front with a rear-end located by five links, a Panhard rod, all hung on progressive rate coil springs. This widely-used arrangement is damped by double-act-ing shock absorbers, while an anti-roll bar is also used.

On the basis of the suspension specification, radial tuned suspension is nothing more than a convenient name that was probably dreamed up by some advertising Copywriter who had just returned from sabbatical leave with a mind uncluttered by soap flakes and pantyhose. But, say what you like about radial tuned suspension, it cannot be denied that it does work. I would suspect that G.M.-H suspension engineers have put in a great deal of work to arrive at the most favourable spring rates for Australian and New Zealand road conditions and have covered literally hundreds of thousands of kilometres on every conceivable road surface, fine-tuning the dynamics of an exceptionally taut and well-made car to ensure that it would even handle safely and well in

the hands of a Neanderthal man.

There is nothing fancy or sophisticated about Holden’s radial tuned suspension, but it happens to be better than most because, I am sure, a tremendous amount of time and energy has been devoted to making it so. I guess if you manage to get what is to all intents and purposes a common type of contemporary suspension layout to work so well, it is fair and reasonable to give the arrangement a name, even though it does not mean anything in particular. From the forgoing, it might be gathered that the Berlina, a 1984 model car, is pleasant enough to drive.

It stops well and it steers well. With the customary discs in front and drum brakes at the rear that under reasonable driving conditions remain fade-free, the Berlina is a nice, safe family car. Steering is by rack and pinion and is power assisted. By accident or design, the measure of assistance seems to be just right. There is all the help one could possibly desire when parking or carrying out some other slow manoeuvres, but on the open road the driver has the satisfaction of feeling he or she is in complete control. I suppose that feeling is enhanced because the car is not so lively that it feels as if it is going to jump put of one’s hands, but at the same time is sufficiently flexible that, with automatic transmission, it will go most places without complaint. The six cylinder petrolinjected engine develops an unspectacular 106 kW at 4400 rpm and a healthy torque figure of 266 Nm at 3200 rpm.

In the main, I liked the interior layout of this Cortina sized saloon although from any self-respecting driver’s viewpoint the instrument layout must be rated appalling. The person who convinced G.M.-H marketing people that square-faced dials have advantages over round faced ones would surely be better employed selling bikinis and refrigerators to Eskimos.

I would assume that as long as G.M.-H makes Holdens people will continue to buy them because, even though the Australian and New Zealand companies have reverted to an old habit of giving drivers an uncomfortable seat to sit upon for any length of time, the Commodore is the sort of honest-to-goodness car that people continue to believe is as good as money in the bank. And, talking about money, the Commodore Berlina I sampled ran out at $28,930. As I have said before, cars do not come cheaply these days, but if you can spend that sort of money, there is not much around that is better than a Commodore, even though there is not much new model gilt on this one. '