2008 Holden SS V Sportwagon Road Test Review

Show me someone who does not respond to the bellow of a V8 under the whip, and I will show you a corpse – an ex-parrot, dead as a maggot.

It is one of the polarising sounds of the post-Kyoto age. To some, a V8 on song is akin to sin: its sound is the devil at work, the screech of the Nazgul, the wail of the Banshee, a harkening to a darker – and best forgotten – primal past.

Others, young blokes and ‘tradies’ mostly, love it. They’ll turn and take an eye-full; to them, it’s as irresistible as breathing.

Will it disappear? Will the pressure on scant resources and the race to reduce emissions eventually hammer the final nail into the coffin of the beast, and banish the V8 to the mists of motoring history?

These are scary days for the hopeless petrol-head. It’s the kind of thing that keeps rabbits like me – and, I suspect, rabbits like you – awake at night.

Of course, there is a perfectly sensible reason why Holden and Ford still offer a thumping V8 as part of the Commodore and Falcon model line-up. It’s because people want them. Some – in fact, many of us - are prepared to pay the price; to suffer a little additional pain at the pump for the singular joy of sliding behind the wheel with a V8 under the toe.

One part of the price to pay may mean driving a little less. It may mean using the car the way Europeans do… as part of a chosen lifestyle: a premium to be enjoyed. It may mean thinking a little more before jumping behind the wheel.

And if that’s the price…?

So, what then of the superlative, rock-solid and sinfully quick SS Sportwagon?

Did I say superlative? Ah yes, superlative indeed.

But before we talk about the drive, let’s spend a moment or two to talk about the car. Because this car, the Sportwagon, represents a u-turn for Holden. The style of that back is Euro to the core. It turns long-accepted notions of the Aussie ‘station wagon’ on its head.

Since the VT, and earlier in the Kingswood, the Commodore wagon has ridden on the extended wheelbase of the Statesman. And had the shape and style of a wine barrel.  You could put a football team in there and still find room to hang a chandelier. Commercial and fleet buyers loved it.

That was the old wagon. With this one, the VE Sportwagon, the extended wheelbase, raised roof and bulbous lines disappear. They’re gone - and also gone is the cavernous space.

Instead, in the Sportwagon, it is replaced by ingenious (smaller) space, and arresting Euro-style. It makes an emphatic statement. In our care, it turned heads everywhere.