Holden Commodore (VN)

Among the 79 Holden entries in the MotorJury library, the Holden Commodore (VN) holds its own page in a catalogue built to record every car ever made, from series production to one-off concepts. The record places its introduction in 1988. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Holden Commodore (VN) properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1980s were the decade of turbocharging, electronic fuel injection and the first mass digital engine management — Group B rallying and hot hatches defined its performance culture. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Ferrari Ferrari F40, the Mazda Mazda MX-5, the Lexus Lexus LS — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Holden Commodore (VN) reads like this: the record lists its engine as Petrol engine / gasoline: / 2.0 L GM Family II engine#C20NE / C20NE Straight-four engine / I4 / 2.2 L I4 (China) / 2.6 L Opel cam-in-head engine#2.6 litre I6 / C26NE; kerb weight is recorded at 1311 kg–1492 kg; drive goes through 5-speed Borg-Warner T-5 manual / 4-speed GM HydraMatic 700 automatic; the layout is Front-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Holden story

Within Holden's own catalogue the Holden Commodore (VN) sits alongside the Holden 48-215, the Holden Adventra, the Holden Apollo, the Holden Astra. The record names the Holden Commodore (VL) / Toyota Crown (S120) (Lexcen) as its predecessor and the Holden Commodore (VP) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Phillip Zmood. Assembly is recorded at Australia: Adelaide, South Australia (Elizabeth) / New Zealand: Wellington (Trentham: 1988–1990).

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

A specification sheet is only half a car's story. The other half — what breaks, what it costs to keep, which years to avoid — lives in MotorJury's ownership database, computed nightly from federal complaint and recall records and EPA economy data. Where the Holden Commodore (VN) was sold in the United States, its model years carry full ownership verdicts there.