Vauxhall Monaro VXR
Why 6.9: Holden built the Monaro in Australia; Vauxhall imported it, fitted a griffin badge and sold it in Britain as the VXR — 398 bhp from a 6.0-litre LS2 V8, a six-speed manual and 1,677 kg of rear-drive coupe. Nothing else on a UK price list offered that combination at the money, and the cars have been used accordingly: cheap to buy, expensive to run, and only recently climbing.
Layout
Natural habitat
Ride comfort
Sound
Six litres of pushrod LS2 with a lazy off-idle burble and a genuinely hard edge under load — the most American noise ever sold wearing a griffin. But two valves per cylinder and 6,500 rpm mean it thumps rather than climbs.
8-cylinder · naturally aspirated · 6,500 rpm redline · rated 7.0 / 10 for engine sound
Market value
Median asking price, good condition · €51k (2005) → €29k (2026), trending down · illustrative data
Child seats · ISOFIX
ISOFIX was spreading through these years rather than fitted across the board — whether a given car has rear anchors depends on its year and market.
Children were expected in the back. Front-passenger ISOFIX effectively didn't exist in this era, and airbag deactivation was patchy — treat the front seat as a no unless a specific car proves otherwise.
Derived from production years and seating layout, not a per-car source. ISOFIX was standardised as ISO 13216 in 1997, required on new EU model types from 2011 and on all new EU cars from 2014.
The long version
The Monaro was Holden's Commodore-based coupe, revived in 2001 after a 25-year absence, and General Motors' global structure meant it could be exported almost unchanged — a Chevrolet Lumina Coupe in the Middle East, a Pontiac GTO in America, and from 2004 a Vauxhall Monaro in the United Kingdom. The VXR badge arrived first with the 5.7-litre LS1 at 329 bhp, then in 2005 with the 6.0-litre LS2 making 398 bhp at 6,000 rpm and 530 Nm at 4,400, and Top Gear magazine handed it a best muscle car award largely for the improbability of a right-hand-drive Australian V8 coupe appearing on a British forecourt at all. Vauxhall closed the experiment in 2007 by replacing it with the four-door VXR8, which made the Monaro's three-year UK run look like exactly the anomaly it was. Values then collapsed the way large-capacity coupes always do in a market with fuel duty this high, bottoming out at a fraction of the original £35,000 — and that is the point at which enthusiast ownership took over from the original buyers. Running costs kept the speculators out, because nobody in Britain stores an LS2 as an investment, so what survives is largely driven; the recent climb in values is the market slowly noticing how few good ones are left.