The former Holden factory in Elizabeth, South Australia, is being transformed into a $500 million Australia Post parcel super hub, with the 83,000m2 facility scheduled to open in late 2028.
A groundbreaking ceremony has been held for the project, which will replace the former car factory with a parcel processing hub capable of handling up to 400,000 parcels per day – double the capacity of Australia Post’s existing Adelaide Airport Parcel Facility.
“We’re spending more time shopping [online] and as a result there’s this huge volume of parcels now coming through Australia Post’s system, and they need modern warehousing, modern parcel delivery and the facilities to do it,” South Australian Acting Deputy Premier Nick Champion toldAdelaide Now.
The redevelopment follows similar transformations of other former Australian vehicle manufacturing sites.
The former Holden Special Vehicles (HSV) site at Clayton, in Melbourne’s south-east – where Volkswagen, Volvo and Datsun/Nissan vehicles were also built between 1964 and 1992 – was demolished in 2025 to make way for a data centre.
Likewise, part of the former Ford Australia assembly plant at Broadmeadows, where every generation of the Falcon was built until production ended in 2016, is set to become the site of a data centre operated by Singapore-based Zerra DC.
The Elizabeth factory opened in 1960, just months after Ford’s Broadmeadows plant. Initially producing body panels, the first complete vehicle – an HD Holden – rolled off its production line in 1965 according to the State Library of South Australia.
Over the following 52 years, the plant built more than seven million vehicles, including models as varied as the Kingswood, Torana, Monaro and Gemini through to the Commodore, Cruze and Statesman.
It also built Toyota-badged vehicles under the Button Plan, the Hawke Government’s industry rationalisation strategy introduced in 1985, which aimed to reduce the number of locally built vehicle models and improve manufacturing efficiency.
As part of that rationalisation, Holden closed its Acacia Ridge plant in Queensland in 1985, followed by its Dandenong, Victoria factory in 1994, leaving Elizabeth as the last of the company’s seven Australian assembly plants.
The final vehicle built at Elizabeth was a VF II Holden Commodore SS-V Redline sedan, which rolled off the production line on October 20, 2017. Holden later applied the Commodore name to an imported Opel Insignia-based liftback and wagon.
General Motors shuttered the Holden brand in 2020, but the American automaker remains in Australia and New Zealand. It imports Chevrolet and GMC vehicles under the General Motors Specialty Vehicles (GMSV) banner, and separately imports Cadillac vehicles which are sold through a separate retail network.
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