A RWD Commodore produced in Australia is widely accepted to be no longer after 2016 and the current VF model - it is kind of a run out at the moment, being a facelifted VE, so it will be really showing its age in another 3 years and GMH cannot afford a VE equalling one billion dollars to develop a new car for a potentially small market segment. It is a shame, but families just aren't buying big cars like that anymore. They are moving towards SUV's and MPV's for practicality.
The badge may live on however, and hopefully, for Austalia's sake, it will still be produced in Australia. The Holden boss man has stated the next Commodore will be on a global platform, so it is extremely likely to be built on something like the Epsilon II platform, as Chad suggests in the first post.
http://www.topgear.com/au/car-news/vf-c ... t-the-lastThe more I look at it, the more convinced I am that Holden is bringing the 2 cars together in styling, so close that most people won't be able to tell the difference by the time the models merge in 2017. I'm just not sure whether they will try and retain the Malibu badge or kill it in favour of retaining the Commodore name plate.
Honestly, they look very similar already and the Malibu is only (something like) 85mm shorter, so it is in virtually the same class as the Commodore. If you asked Joe Public which was which, they probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and with another 4 years of facelifts to bring them even closer, it will probably be even more difficult to tell the difference. This is almost exactly what happened to small RWD cars in the late 70's and early 80's as they were gradually phased out in favour of FWD models.
