The car that most Americans know as the Chevy Caprice PPV (Police Patrol Vehicle) owes as much to the Australian designed and built Holden Caprice luxury sedan reviewed here as the latter owes to business decisions Ford Australia made a couple of decades ago.

In the early 1970s, Holden – GM’s Australian subsidiary – introduced two new models to compete with local rival Ford. The first was the Statesman, a vehicle with no Holden badging whatsoever, designed as a direct competitor to Ford’s Australian-built Fairlane and as a replacement for the unloved Brougham sedan.

A few years later came the Statesman Caprice, an even more luxurious model, introduced to compete with Ford’s freshly minted LTD.

Thus the Caprice name was born. Over the years the Caprice has grown in interior room, price and standard equipment but retains the same basic idea of what Aussie luxury should be. We took the V8 engined V Series II model out for a week long road test and review.

Once a production hub, Australia's motoring industry is now facing the prospect of losing one of its most acclaimed model series, the Holden Commodore (and apparently, its Caprice derivatives) after the upcoming redesign, which is scheduled for 2013.

While production of the 2013 Commodore VF will endure at least until 2017, The Sydney Morning Herald (via its Drive car site) is reporting today that Holden chairman and managing director Mike Devereux confirmed that the brand will decide on its local manufacturing future beyond 2018 before the end of December.

If you're not from the Land of Down Under or at least an avid Holden fan, then you're probably unfamiliar with the 1987 HDT Commodore VL SS Group A prepped by Australian racing legend Peter Brock. So before we get into the details on the new VL/VE Group A package, allow us to fill you in on a bit of the history.

Up until the late 1980s, Peter Brock was running HDT, or Holden Dealer Team, but GM's Australian division subsequently cut ties with him after he began publicly supporting and fitting all HDT models with the a device called the "Energy Polariser".

The first batch of GM's Australian-built 2012 Chevrolet Caprice PPV [Police Patrol Vehicle] cruisers hit the streets across the States earlier this year with more to arrive in the following months.

Despite the fact that the police car launch has sparked some interest for a civilian version as well, the Detroit maker has not such plans on the table – at least not for now.

Today, we stumbled upon a detailed -if not a bit tiring and lengthy- video walkaround of the 2012 Caprice from a Youtube user who goes by the name "Saabkyle04". The unmarked police cruisers with the detective package were located at a GM dealership in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In an eco-marathon, you normally expect the winner to be a hybrid, a diesel or some other super-frugal -and usually underpowered- car. Well, in the Fleet World MPG Marathon the champion had no less than 431-horses kicking and screaming to be unleashed under its bonnet.

You read that correctly: the LS3 6.2-liter V8-powered VXR8 - essentially a Holden HSV rebadged as a Vauxhall for the UK market- won the two-day, 350-mile economy trial.

How did this happen? There's a simple explanation: this award wasn't given to the most fuel efficient vehicle in absolute numbers, but to the one that recorded the highest percent improvement over the official fuel consumption figures.

While Holden's engineering team is working hard on the development of the new generation Commodore dubbed VF, which is expected to launch within the next two to three years, the company's designers took some time off to spiff up the current model.

For the 2012 model year, Australia's homegrown Commodore VE (sold as the Pontiac G8 in the States before the brand was axed) receives some minor exterior and interior enhancements, plus the introduction of the track-inspired FE3 sports suspension on the Redline series.

For those of you that think driving through the congested roads of Manhattan or Paris is bad, maybe you should take a look at the following video, which seems to have been shot somewhere in the Middle East (if you happen to know where, leave us a comment below).

In broad daylight and while normal drivers are using the road, numerous wannabe drifters, mostly in American and Australian rear-wheel drive saloons like the Ford Crown Victoria, Chrysler 300 and the Holden-based Chevrolet Caprice, are showing off their rides slideways.