"I think the name should stay. It’s synonymous with Australian cars. We’ve got to keep it. It’s Australian history."

Mr Slater is one of those people whose entire family — including his mother, wife and three children — drives Holdens. He says it’s just not done in the family to buy a Toyota or a Peugeot. "They all know what I think."

He reckons he has owned "easily" 70 Holdens in his life, and as a child his father drove a 1954 FJ Holden and a HQ Statesman.

Currently Mr Slater owns 11 Holdens, from a 1965 HD ute to a 2004 Commodore sedan.

They all have a story: there’s the 1970 beige and white HT station wagon which he inherited from his father-in-law, who bought it brand new.

And the 1986 VL Commodore station wagon that he still regularly races at Phillip Island and Sandown.

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But Mr Slater also worked for Holden for 32 years – from an apprentice motor mechanic in 1978 when he was 15 years until he accepted a payout, as an office-bound production planner in 2009. He now runs his own brake business.

He hates the fact Holden manufacturing went offshore from Australia in the first place, and dreams that we could do it again.

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"We where the first to make them in 1948 and then we were the last to make them in 2017, and I think we’re a country that could do them."

But he accepts that it's an impossible dream.

"Penny pinching I supposed you’d call it. To them, they just don’t care. It’s money. I believe [that's] the reason they’re doing it. But it’s wrong."