Thread: A sad day for Victoria, south Australia and Australia as local car production ends.

Originally Posted by Pickles2

Absolutely spot on my friend, "on the wall for years but no one wanted to read it",...ain't that the truth.
The real blame lies with those in Detroit, who for years made Detroit/Dearborn U.S. biased decisions at the expense of Aussie Holden & Ford, including moving with the times to produce a vehicle that Aussies actually wanted to buy.
Pickles.

Never going to happen..

Why would you tool up for a market that has an insignificant volume compared to the world when other factories can produce the vehicle in their current configuration.

The USA has always protected its market, hence why their biggest selling vehicle (Japanese) has a production facility in the USA.

We were never going to be a winner on the international stage... shipping negated much of that and other markets already had similar competing products.

As for tax free or reduced export costs - we were there.. that crap little Capri was sold in the USA for 50% of the local price, Mitsubishi exported to the USA with higher specifications than Aussie premium models, Holden shipped GTOs to the USA. And 4cyl Calais/Statesman’s to Singapore...

We were never going to be competitive- heck Holden’s most equipped base model took the VF to even come close to overseas offerings...

Aussie manufacturing took locals for fools and kept the features from the average punter who went elsewhere looking for value.

Long before tax breaks and subsidies were stopped all the players had prepared to leave...

Aussie built cars were sourcing parts from several local suppliers who had for years been manufacturing their parts overseas, I know of 3 in SA who switched to that 15 years ago, and just did a fraction of the work once the parts landed in AU.

Did nobody notice that Holden took less than 24 hours after subsidies were cancelled to announce closure, ran an already produced advertisement on TV and had a full scale wind down plan in place by that week!

We should be pleased these companies had chosen to operate in Australia for as long as they did - as they’re all foreign owned, and almost always have been...

Looking at the car park here at work - there’s 3 locally produced vehicles - all over 5 years old. The rest are Euro, Thai or Japanese (and a Frog thing for good measure)....

Speaks volumes on where market wants are positioned, certainly not in the offerings locally.

I’ve been aware of that for years..

So...Let me rephrase. Bring non-volume/non-profitable manufacturing back home.

And as the Big Family Sedans market is well covered by volume plants. Australia’s **** ant volumes are nothing...