Ten colours will feature on the Holden VF Commodore palette with seven carried over from the old car, three dropped, and three introduced. At least on the Calais V-Series show car, two interior trim combinations will be available to match.
Redhot, Phantom (black), Heron (white), Perfect Blue, Nitrate (silver-grey), Karma (teal), and Alchemy (deep purple) continue over into the new VF Commodore range, while Regal Peacock, Prussian Steel and Fantale are new.
Fantale will be the ‘hero’ of the VF Commodore range, according to VF colour and trim designer Kirsty Lindsay (below).
“Orange has real significance on Holden product – we’ve gone all the way from looking at the Torana and the Monaro, which had some pretty ‘out there’ oranges, right through to the Sandman orange, through to the VTII Tiger Orange which is so iconic, through to VE when we launched Ignition Orange on the sports vehicles as the hero colour.
“Orange keeps reinventing itself, and for 20 years we’ve seen it as being a really important fashion colour, not just in automotive but in product design.
“It re-interprets itself, it reinvents itself, and it doesn’t seem to go ‘off trend’.”
Regal Peacock is what Lindsay describes as a “beautiful jewel-like green, almost a black” and will headline on the luxury-sports range including the Calais.
“It looks beautiful with chrome, so you get the contrast of the bright chrome with a very dark exterior colour,” adds the colour designer.
Prussian steel (above), meanwhile, is the colour of the Calais V-Series show car.
“We’re calling it a tinted grey, but it’s got so much travel…” says Lindsay. “From some angles it’s green, from some angles it’s blue… [it has] a shift of colour, so as you move around the colour, the colour moves.
“There’s a beautiful, silver highlight, then it drops it to this tealy green.
“This colour was developed in conjunction with the interior colours … these light, luxurious interiors.”
Chief designer of interior colour and trim design, Sharon Gauchi (above), developed the interior colour combinations that would match the exterior ducos.
“From a materials and colours point of view we’ve been able to embellish all the points of the interior,” she says.
“Calais V interior one is a lighter interior colour,” says Gauchi. “We use black as the canvas, but we’ve grown the mid-section of lighter colour to create this very European interior look with the colour of the light grey and black colour combination.
“But what we’ve done with this interior is a lot of debate about whether we’d continue to have a wood [trim] with VF… the wood’s quite recessive [with] it’s modern and its grain type selection.”
There are two types of chrome featured inside – galvano chrome, with a duller milky finish, and bright chrome “for smaller areas to catch light and increase that sense of opulence” according to Gauchi.
The black interior (bottom), second for the Calais V luxury line, is a “continuation of black in the IP lower and in the seats, but [we’ve] incorporated the light titanium colour with stitching that matches, to bring up that sense of embellishment and feeling of luxuriousness and sophistication.”
According to the colour and trim specialist, “darker, blacker” trim creates a more “neutral environment” instead of wood.
Both of the two very different flagship interiors get alcantara on the instrument panels and door trim, black or cream leather on the seat face and sides, but man made leather on the back of the seat and headrest.
