And so Holden is added to the list of brands General Motors has failed. The Australian arm is another famous marque GM has either shut down completely – as it will here at the end of the year – or sold off, or a slight combination of the two.

It’s a long roll call now: Holden joins Hummer, Lotus, Oldsmobile, Opel, Saab, Saturn, Pontiac and Vauxhall. There are fewer working former Autocar photographers than former GM brands.

I suppose GM might resurrect some of the grand old names it still owns, and Hummer is due for reprisal as a model under the GMC marque. Others have blossomed since leaving the old firm, while Saab was left on a Samaritan’s doorstep clearly too ill to recover, but surely somebody will resurrect it one day.

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Holden, one suspects, won’t be so lucky, having been stumbling to an undignified end for a while. Too few Australians bought the Commodore, Australia’s own big saloon car, to keep it in local production. Even fewer bought its Vauxhall Insignia-based replacement, a car that Ford racers in the Australian Touring Car paddock affectionately dub ‘the Opel’.

Alongside GM’s exit from the antipodes, though, comes the bigger news that it’s pulling out of all right-hand-drive countries. Maybe that was inevitable after it left Europe, flogging Opel/Vauxhall to PSA as it went (both send a postcard to say they’re doing fine, btw) and losing the economy of scale that came with selling 350,000 Vauxhalls (and half a dozen rebadged Holdens) every year.

21 Saab tracking front

Maybe GM thought PSA would pay it licence money to build the new Corsa it had just about finished. Instead PSA took the ‘no-brainer’ decision to create its own version in its shortest time ever.