The Commodore SS-V ute I tested recently threatened to scrape its front spoiler on the driveway. Ground clearance is little more than half that of the original Holden ute. But, stop right there! You don’t buy the latest Holden coupe utility for practical reasons like carrying bales of hay or rounding up the sheep. You may even think twice before carrying your motorcycle in the tray.
What the SS-V is about is nothing short of extreme sports. Like any other vehicle riding on 19-inch alloys shod with 245/40 rubber, it is far more comfortable on bitumen than typical back country corrugated dirt roads. It will rip through the standing 400 metres in less than 14 seconds, having passed the 100 km/h mark in six seconds. When the SS-V peers through the Holden history album to find its spiritual ancestor, it pauses not at the image of the original 1950 50-2106 coupe utility but at Bruce McPhee’s Warwick Yellow Monaro GTS 327 taking the chequered flag in the 1968 Bathurst 500-mile race. The V8 ute has become the new Australian sports car!
It’s a little difficult to work out exactly how this happened. Certainly Holden was keen to give buyers maximum choice. Just a few years ago there were two and four-door utes and the choice of rear-drive or 4WD. But there was little interest in the genuinely capable 4WD Holden ute that could go almost anywhere. Meanwhile the Commodore SS just kept racking up the sales. That success encouraged the Holden marketing team to augment the SS with an even hotter variant, the SS-V.
‘Hotter’ does not mean more power. The 270 kW 6.0-litre V8 was deemed adequate. What the ‘V’ model scores over the SS is those 19-inch rims in lieu of 18s and leather inserts in the excellent seats.
As well as being the perfect vehicle for lap-dashing at your local racetrack, the SS-V can actually be persuaded to serve as a light commercial vehicle but the emphasis here is on the ‘light’. The maximum load it is allowed to carry is a little more than half a tonne, or half what the workhorse Commodore and Falcon utes can heft.
Overall impressions are strong, helped no doubt by the in-your-face metallic light purple (Morpeus) of the test SS-V. It’s a great cruiser, the engine wafting along at little more than 1500 rpm at 110 km/h. Despite the hoon car element, there is much advanced thinking built into the SS-V. The massive torque from its 6.0 litre engine allows the ute to run this moonshot gearing. That explains how I used right on nine litres per 100 kilometres on the highway in the six-speed manual I enjoyed for a week. What this means is that if you drove this ute interstate at the legal limit, it would slurp far less fuel than a humble and much smaller Holden ute from the 1960s. Come to think of it, at a cruising speed of 100 km/h it would be more economical than the original 1950 model, widely lauded for its thrift. So beneath the flash and dazzle, there’s some real engineering ingenuity. But I’m still not sure about the Morpheus.
