Ford to close up shop in Australia?

[perthdrivers.txt]

Wonder if build quality will get better or worse

[jgryder]

I think 3 years is very optimistic, what happens if Falcon sales drop to 100 a month? surely they would just pull the plug - It's just a weird thing to announce 3 years in advance as consumers don't really like to back a losing brand. Could have implications for the imported range - dunno why they just didn't do a 380 and give it the chop fast and get on with it.

[TonyJZX]

theres no fucken nostalgia for 380s, it wasnt on the market long enough

i reckon ford will probably do quite well all the way up until the bitter end

[clutch-monkey]

Thinking about this whole situation really frosts my weeties. What a nation of sooks and whingers and snob dilettantes we've become. Too good to buy our own fucking cars.

why should people have to buy a product they don't like over the alternatives just because it was made here?

[TonyJZX]

a company that doesnt tailor their products to what consumers want deserves to die

from my standpoint, of course i love rwd skid machines but the public clearly likes something different

the koreans and VAG seem to have hit the public hot button

companies that think the "public is wrong" dont last... thats Ford

the mountain doesnt come to mohammed (such as it is)

[GTREA]

So all these people rushing out to buy a Falcon for future investment......

Say Ford does build a $110'000 HSV LSA competitor before it folds, will it drop 50% and more of its value for the first 10 years before making any ROI after say 20years aka Group A or Walkinshaw Commodores in the past?

Or will it be an instant investment?

I think the former.

[irsa76]

I think 3 years is very optimistic, what happens if Falcon sales drop to 100 a month? surely they would just pull the plug - It's just a weird thing to announce 3 years in advance as consumers don't really like to back a losing brand. Could have implications for the imported range - dunno why they just didn't do a 380 and give it the chop fast and get on with it.

I'm actually wondering if this is all a play for sympathy? Get money from the gumbyment to stay open, and get a rush of sales and have people discover how good the Falcon is, they hope.

On the other, realist, view, dead by 2015.

[Captiva Fan]

So all these people rushing out to buy a Falcon for future investment......

It's a car, they're retated.

Say Ford does build a $110'000 HSV LSA competitor before it folds, will it drop 50% and more of its value for the first 10 years before making any ROI after say 20years aka Group A or Walkinshaw Commodores in the past?

Yep, exactly that.
Is a Walkin'stick currently worth as much as it'd have cost to buy it, and keep it garaged & serviced in the capital cities where something like 90% of us live?

[GTREA]

I remember these sitting on $25'000 for many....many years

$56,000 - $64,000



All Walkinshaw Commodores were finished in the same Azure Blue and were priced on a par with the best European luxury cars at $47,000 (more than three times the price of a base VL) when new. With enormous growth in prices over the past couple of years, the Walkinshaw Group A Commodores have fast become hot property on the modern Aussie muscle car scene

[260BC]

Falcon ended up being a nowhere car, it was no longer a family car, it had no badge cred except with non new car buying bogans, it did not look like a decent performing car and so on. Where was it supposed to fit in, who was it supposed to appeal to?

Agree that there is now some degree of snobbery in non luxury car buying that never used to exist but basically the Falcon is a dinosaur as far as appeal goes. That's not the new car buying public's fault, Ford should have pensioned it off years ago or else transformed it into something that did appeal to a sufficient segment of the market.

[clutch-monkey]

i thought the last few generations have looked good and gone well, but seem to be invisible to the general public.

[MartyRX2]

The FG XR6 is the best looking Falcon since the XY. The people that build it should be proud. I don't really see how the product is out of touch with what people want. I guess a car that uses no more than 10l/100km around town, iPod connectivity, enough room for an adult in the back and sits high for that illusion of safety is what matters. I drove a Kia Sportage hire car a while back and if you didn't have to tow anything large or need a huge boot then it would do fine as a family hauler.

[Bob Vegana.]

If I had the choice, I'd take an FG XR6 over the SV6 any day.

The problem is, the uninformed buying public has no idea the Falcon exists anymore. They could've killed it off 3 years ago, without a single word to the public, and no one would've noticed.

[fury]

Will be nice to buy a brand new XR6 turbo for $30k in 2 years time.. they're going to have to sell them at that price then to shift them.

I will miss them seeing them around. BA-FG were always easy on the eyes. To think that the AU was the one that possibly killed them here :-/

[E30is]

The Chinese are yet to do anything but copy someone else's stuff.
The Indians won't do anything without someone else having signed a form in quadruplicate; anything approaching "change" in a product or process there must be an absolute nightmare.
Koreans ... dunno, they seem to need others in order to design anything (eg. Holden).
There's definitely a value-add hole involving smarts/ingenuity in our corner of the world; we just ain't doing much about leveraging it.

tis kinda the point, do something they cant do (yet) to stay a step ahead of them to make it worthwhile. fuck knows what though anything requiring exceptional quality is a start so no widgets never gonna beat them at those