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Holden Monaro 2nd Gen

Overview

The second-generation Monaro is two stories bolted together, and reading it as one car is the usual mistake. The first is the HQ, launched on 15 July 1971 as the biggest engineering programme Holden had ever attempted: a wholly new body, a new semi-perimeter chassis, and coil springs at the rear where the old car had leaves. The coupe that came out of it is the prettiest thing Holden built, and it was sold four ways, from a plain six-cylinder two-door to the GTS 350 with an imported Chevrolet V8. A four-door GTS followed in March 1973, which upset people at the time and looks obvious now.

The second story is the decline. The 350 and the base coupe were dropped when the HJ arrived in October 1974. The coupe itself was gone by 1976, replaced by a limited-edition luxury two-door that carried no Monaro badge at all. From October 1977 the name was deleted outright and the surviving four-door was sold simply as the Holden GTS, which is how the Monaro ended in January 1979: as a sedan, wearing somebody else's badge.

Distinctions

The defining attributes and collector status that make this car garage-worthy.

Poster Car

The car on the bedroom wall, the one people dreamed about before they could drive.

Octane Files Select

Renowned for its history, engineering, or cultural weight.

Collectibility scorecard

Rated 1 to 10 on the traits that matter for owning, driving, and holding on to a car like this.

Desirability

7/10

Rarity

6/10

Driving thrill

6/10

Investment trajectory

7/10

Usability

6/10

Ease of restoration

7/10

Cultural impact

8/10

Electronic dependence

Fully analogHeavily electronic

This is a fully mechanical car, with one caveat about its last years. Every engine runs a carburettor, a mechanical fuel pump and a points distributor; the throttle is a cable, the brakes are hydraulic with a vacuum booster, and there is no engine management of any kind. What the later cars gained was emissions plumbing rather than electronics: from July 1976 the ADR27A rules brought leaner calibration, revised distributor curves and exhaust gas recirculation, all of it still mechanical. An electronic ignition conversion is the common modern upgrade and changes nothing else about how the car works.

Market data

Demand tier, price trend, and typical values by condition, based on recent sales data.

Demand tier

EntrySolidHighBlue-chip

Strong, sustained collector demand. Good examples never wait long for a buyer.

Value trajectory

AppreciatingStableCooling

Values are climbing. The market wants more of these than exist.

Price by condition

Driver

$45k

Excellent

$85k

Concours

$125k

The second generation trades below the first and the gap is consistent: 68 verified sales through Australian Muscle Car Sales since 2003 average A$112,636, against A$185,699 for the HK to HG cars. Within the generation the money follows the coupe. A four-speed GTS 308 coupe made A$189,990 in May 2026 and a GTS 350 coupe A$295,000 in 2023, while HJ and HX four-door GTS cars still change hands from around A$45,000. The band below describes the volume car, an HQ Monaro coupe with a Holden V8. Values are rising, but almost entirely inside Australia, and that is what caps the ceiling.

Values as of August 2026.

Buyer's guide

What anyone seriously considering this car should know first.

Why it's worth it

The generation where the Monaro became a four-door and then lost its name entirely

Callout

The car Nightrider steals in the opening of Mad Max is a 1972 HQ Monaro

What to watch for

Window surrounds decide whether a second-generation coupe is worth restoring. Water sits in them, the rot travels into the roof and screen apertures, and putting it right properly means cutting into structure. Trade Unique Cars is blunt about why so few HQ coupes survived: through the 1980s that repair cost more than the whole car. Rear quarters, floors, boot floor and sills follow the same pattern. Then work out what you are actually looking at. GTS badges, stripes and instruments have been added to plain Monaros and Kingswoods for decades, and 350 cars are cloned with Chevrolet engines that were never rare. A Vehicle Production Report from Holden Historical Services, drawn from Holden's own build records, gives body number, build date, plant and whether the car was a customer order or dealer stock, and it settles most arguments before money moves. Modified cars are their own market. A tidy 350-swapped street car can be excellent value and fine company, but it is the first thing to soften if the market turns, so buy one because you want it rather than as a position.

The Story

Driving character

The HQ is a bigger, softer, better-riding car than the Monaro it replaced, and that was deliberate. Coil springs at the rear replaced leaves, the chassis underneath was new, and the result rides like something a decade younger than a 1968 Monaro despite being only three years newer. It also carries more weight, so a 308 feels relaxed rather than urgent. The GTS 350 is the exception. With 205kW at 4,800rpm and 488Nm at 3,200 through a Muncie four-speed it is properly fast for the period, and a manual car will run a quarter mile in under fifteen seconds. The automatic softens it so thoroughly that a manual 308 is the quicker car, which is the single most useful thing to know when two of them are for sale on the same day. Late cars are different again. From July 1976 the ADR27A emissions rules leaned the tune out, and quoted power fell partly because the engines lost some and partly because Australia switched from gross to net ratings. The HZ answers with Radial Tuned Suspension and four-wheel discs, and handles better than anything else here.

Design

The HQ's signature is the thing most people look straight past: the A-pillars. Phillip Zmood drew them thin and curved, partly to get ahead of proposed Australian rules on pillar strength, and Holden's own designers say the shape has never been repeated on a production car. They are why the glasshouse looks so light on a car this large. Leo Pruneau, who arrived from Vauxhall in 1969, worked out the front ends, and there were three: a plain nose for the Belmont, Kingswood and Monaro, quad headlights for the Premier and Monaro LS, and a split Pontiac-style grille for the Statesman. The coupe lost its own horizontal tail lights and the curved blisters over its wheel arches to cost, and had to share sedan parts instead. After the HQ the changes are mostly about the face. The HJ of 1974 wears a blunt, upright nose widely compared to the Chevrolet Monte Carlo. The HX blacked out the brightwork and colour-coded the bumpers. The HZ gave the sedan quad headlights and spoilers at both ends.

Motorsport pedigree

Holden had stopped racing the Monaro before this one existed. For 1970 the Holden Dealer Team switched to the much lighter Torana GTR XU-1, and the argument was settled at Warwick Farm that September when Colin Bond's Torana beat Bob Jane's Monaro 350 outright. No HQ Monaro appears in the 1972 Bathurst results at all. What ruled out a comeback was politics. On 25 June 1972 the Sun-Herald ran a front page announcing that 160mph supercars were coming; the New South Wales transport minister reacted exactly as the article intended, and on 30 June Holden abandoned its V8 Torana. Ford and Chrysler dropped their own projects within weeks. Australia's homologation-special era ended that month, and the Monaro was not part of what followed. So this generation raced in Sports Sedans instead, a category with almost no rules. John Sheppard built Bob Jane an HQ GTS 350 that ran from 1972 to 1979 and won the Marlboro series, then built Pete Geoghegan a Craven Mild HJ with mechanical fuel injection, independent rear suspension and a Hewland transaxle. Spectacular machines, and nothing whatever like the showroom cars.

In culture

In 1979 a black 1972 HQ Monaro opens Mad Max. The Nightrider steals it, outruns the police through the first reel and destroys it, and in doing so gives this car the widest audience any Holden has ever had. The Falcon interceptor got the posters; the Monaro is the one being chased. At home its second life was the street-machine scene. The HQ coupe became the default canvas for Australian modified-car culture and still dominates Summernats, which is both why so few standard cars survive and why the ones that do are worth what they are. The name came back in 2001, three decades after this car, on a Commodore-based coupe developed by design chief Mike Simcoe's team in their own time and shown as a concept in 1998. Holden built 11,574 for Australia and exported more than 40,000 to the United States as the Pontiac GTO, plus a run of Vauxhall Monaros for Britain. Then General Motors retired Holden itself in 2020, which turned the whole nameplate, coupes and four-doors alike, into something Australians discuss in the past tense.

Rivals

Cars from other manufacturers that competed for the same buyers when new.

Ford Falcon GT XY

USA·Muscle·1970–1972

Ford Falcon GT XA

USA·Muscle·1972–1973

Chrysler Valiant Charger VH

We haven’t profiled this car yet. Request to add

Chrysler Valiant Charger VJ

We haven’t profiled this car yet. Request to add

Ford Falcon GT XB

USA·Muscle·1973–1976

Ford Falcon Cobra

USA·Muscle·1978–1978

Owning One

Why collectors want it

The HQ coupe is the shape Australians want, and there are not many honest ones left. Holden built 13,872 Monaro coupes across the HQ, then spent the 1970s and 1980s letting them rust and the 1990s letting them be modified, so a standard, straight, unmolested car is the rare thing now. Australian Muscle Car Sales has verified 68 second-generation sales since 2003, from A$45,000 to A$295,000, averaging A$112,636, and lists declared GTS replicas alongside real cars, which tells you plainly how much of the surviving population has been rebadged.

The hierarchy starts with the GTS 350 coupe, just over 400 built, and runs down through the four-speed GTS 308 to the HJ coupes, which are far rarer than any HQ but less loved, to the four-door GTS cars nobody wanted for thirty years and which are now the cheap way in. The Holden LE sits outside the ranking altogether as a curiosity that happens to be worth about what a good GTS coupe is.

Which one to look for

The GTS 350 coupe is the top of this market and the rarest thing here a private buyer can realistically find: just over 400 built, Muncie four-speed or Turbo-Hydramatic 400, the imported Chevrolet 350 rated at 205kW. Worth knowing before you pay 350 money: the automatic version was slower than a manual GTS 308 in most brackets and drank far more fuel, which is exactly why Holden dropped it in October 1974. The car most people should actually buy is the GTS 308 coupe with the four-speed. It is quicker than an automatic 350, much easier to authenticate, and every part of it was made in Australia. Two variants get underweighted. The HJ coupes are much rarer than any HQ, 606 GTS and 337 LS, but sit below them because the blunt front end divides opinion. And the four-door GTS, built from March 1973 to the end of the line, is the only way to buy this car for family money. The Holden LE is the oddity: 606 built, 26 destroyed by fire before delivery, and not a Monaro badge on it anywhere.

Holden GTS (HZ) · 1977–1979

The end of the line, and the only one here with no Monaro badge at all: from October 1977 General Motors deleted the name and sold the car simply as a Holden GTS. Four-door only, quad headlights, spoilers at both ends, four-wheel disc brakes as standard and Holden's Radial Tuned Suspension, which makes it the best-handling car in the generation.

Holden LE · 1976

The coupe's send-off, built on leftover HJ two-door bodies and deliberately not badged as a Monaro. Exclusive metallic LE Red paint, gold honeycomb wheels, Caprice-grade interior and an eight-track player well after cassettes had arrived. Luxury rather than performance, and the last two-door Holden of the era.

Monaro · 1971–1974

The base HQ coupe, with a 173ci six and a three-speed manual as standard. Dropped when the HJ arrived in October 1974, which is why the second half of this generation has no entry-level two-door at all.

Monaro GTS · 1971–1976

The performance coupe, V8 only, with either the 253 or the 308. The four-speed 308 is the sweet spot of the whole generation: quicker than an automatic 350, straightforward to authenticate and entirely Australian under the bonnet.

Monaro GTS 350 · 1971–1974

The last Chevrolet-engined Monaro. The imported 350ci V8 made 205kW at 4,800rpm and 488Nm at 3,200, with a Muncie four-speed or a Turbo-Hydramatic 400. Manual cars ran the quarter mile in under fifteen seconds; the automatic was slower than a manual 308 and much thirstier, which is why it was quietly dropped for the HJ.

Monaro GTS sedan · 1973–1977

Introduced in March 1973 as option packages on the V8 Kingswood sedan, XV4 for the GTS and XW8 for the GTS 350. It outlived the coupe: from the HX of 1976 the four-door was the only car in Australia still wearing a Monaro badge.

Monaro LS · 1971–1976

The luxury coupe rather than the fast one: quad headlights and chrome trim rings shared with the Premier sedan, better trim, and engines from the 202ci six up to the Chevrolet 350. Continued into the HJ, where it became one of the rarest cars in the range.

What owning one is like

You will spend your ownership thinking about water. The window surrounds on the coupes trap it, the rot travels into the roof and screen apertures, and by the time paint bubbles the structure underneath has usually been at it for years. Floors, boot floor, sills and rear quarters go the same way. None of it is beyond an Australian panel shop, but it is the difference between a A$60,000 car and a A$130,000 one. Everything else is genuinely easy. The HQ shared its mechanical parts with 485,650 other Holdens, so nothing underneath is exotic. The 253 and 308 are simple, the Chevrolet 350 is the most supported V8 on earth, and the Tri-Matic and Turbo 400 automatics are both rebuildable by any competent shop. The other reality is documentation. So many GTS badges have been added over the years that the burden of proof sits with the seller, and cars that cannot answer the question trade at a discount which never entirely goes away, however good they look in the photographs.

Upkeep & parts

This is one of the easiest Australian classics to keep running and one of the harder ones to keep straight. Mechanical parts are everywhere: Rare Spares reproduces panels and rust repair sections for the HQ through HZ, and the HQ's enormous production run means brakes, suspension, steering and engine components are shared with hundreds of thousands of other Holdens.

Coupe-specific items are the exception. Glass rubbers, window frames, interior trim and the panels around those troublesome window surrounds are what hold restorations up, and they cost more than the equivalent sedan pieces because far fewer were made.

For research, hqmonaro.com is a genuinely useful reference site for HQ coupe options, colours and registers, and Holden Historical Services supplies Vehicle Production Reports from the factory build records. The clubs are strong in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, and are the fastest way to find a panel beater who has done one of these before.

Budget the way the market does: engines are cheap, gearboxes are cheap, and bodywork decides everything.