Holden Calais Pricing and Specs

I’m not sure how Holden can claim that the car is now subject to the extended warranty (which is an aftermarket one from the third-party supplier) when your car should, according to Holden itself, be covered by the brand’s factory seven-year/unlimited km warranty. Since your car is still within that time limit, I would have thought the factory warranty applies and would cover the differential. The catch was that this seven-year warranty was only offered up to a cut-off date (March 31, 2018) but even after that date, the cover reverted to five-years/unlimited km, so your car should still be covered.

Holden only applied this seven-year warranty to 2018 ZB Commodore and Equinox models, but since the former is what you own, I can’t see how the factory warranty doesn’t apply. Keep trying and if you don’t succeed, the ACCC might be fairly interested in your case.

The difference will be, of course, if the differential problem has been caused by external factors such as a lack of servicing or you using the car to tow excessively heavy loads. But otherwise, the car should be covered against failures of this sort.

As for extended, aftermarket warranties, they’re really a huge rip-off in most cases. They are carefully worded to avoid the insurer paying out on anything actually likely to go wrong with the car. They also tie you into dealership servicing and, often, over-servicing, all in the name of lightening your wallet further. Forget them.

This is an ongoing concern for owners of cars that were built in places that simply don’t have the UV radiation levels we experience in Australia. And, yes, I know your car is a Holden Calais, but the ZB model you own was actually built in Europe and is a fully imported car. That said, even local car-makers have had an awful time over the years trying to get their paint to last in the Aussie sun.

However, I don’t believe that a 2018 car should be showing signs of paint degradation this early, so I think you’d have a very chance of making a warranty claim to have the problem put right. Even though Holden no longer exists as a brand, its parent company still has an obligation to provide parts and service (and warranty) for the next few years. That said, there’s not much in it for General Motors to keep you happy as you won’t be a repeat Holden customer (since the brand is gone).

But it’s definitely worth a try and if you don’t get any satisfaction from head office’s customer service division, I’d be talking to the ACCC (what used to be Consumer Affairs) to see if a resolution can be found. It’s difficult to diagnose problems by remote control, but if the paint is peeling in a very specific section (the drain channels) rather than randomly on the roof, then it would seem as though there might have been a production problem when the roof was painted. If that’s the case, what’s left of Holden should put it right.

The five-speed automatic in your Calais is a bit of an odd one, Mark, as it was only used for a handful of years and only in the high-feature 3.6-litre V6. Holden switched the car to a six-speed automatic in September 2009, so technically, that would be possible to fit to your car. As with a lot of these things, however, it’s not as simple as finding a gearbox and bolting it in. Modern engineering dictates that the five-speed and six-speed transmissions, while physically similar, may have featured bigger differences in terms of the information they fed to the car’s on-board computer and the program within that computer that, in turn, told the gearbox what to do next.

At the very least, you’d need the electronic transmission-control module to make the six-speed work and possibly some changes to sensors and wiring. Even then, you might find that your speedometer needs recalibration. Unlike the good old days when the transmission was simply a set of gears, a modern transmission these days is a much more sophisticated piece of equipment and does a much more complex job.