Holden Gemini, a love letter

This excerpt was borrowed from Holden Gemini, A Love Letter – Click the link for the full story!

How GM’s world car provided some comfort and solace to a young German immigrant in Australia in the 1970s.

By Rob Margeit 12:35:25 October 2022

Our story last week about the return of the Gemini nameplate to Australian new car dealerships opened up a neural pathway to a time in my youth when the Holden Gemini was seemingly ubiquitous on our roads.

I clearly remember as a German immigrant living in outer suburban Melbourne in the late 1970s and into the early ’80s, the preponderance of what I always saw as Opel Kadetts on our roads. They weren’t Kadetts, of course.

Instead, GM’s local arm Holden sold and marketed its ‘world car’ in as Australia as the Holden Gemini, a compact, four-cylinder car available as either a sedan or coupe and, in later generations, a station wagon as well as a panel van.

I didn’t know then what I know now – that some cars where global; that sometimes, the same car wore different badges; that Opel in Germany was owned by the same parent company as Holden in Australia, Vauxhall in Britain and Isuzu in Japan.

I didn’t know then that General Motors’ ‘world car’, born out of the oil crises of the 1970s, when the thirst for smaller more efficient cars grew in direct proportion to the public’s diminishing thirst for fuel-guzzling V8s.

All I saw where Opel Kadetts (pictured above) roaming the streets of this new country, a gentle familiarity amongst a sea of big cars from Ford and Holden and Valiant and a host of other car makers I had never seen before.

In the Gemini, I found a degree of comfort as I struggled to adapt to a new country, a new language, a new way of life. The Gemini became, my car-shaped security blanket.

I especially liked the sleek looking coupe with its liftback styling and pleasing proportions. Sure, it looked a little different to the Kadetts I knew from back home, but it was familiar territory for me.

This excerpt was borrowed from Holden Gemini, A Love Letter – Click the link for the full story!

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