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

Originally Posted by Tombie

Sadly that’s part of the problem..

Once we made world class, then Aussie Class, And by the time we upped our game again the people were already walking.....

Add to that - a significant portion of people I know have a 4wd, or an “SUV” (cringes) and not one has owned an Aussie built car in 20 years.

Ford and Holden insisted on making cars that weren’t what the punters wanted.... simple...

The rest is all **** and glitter...

Holden had already built their exit plans a long time before they announced an end....

Welcome to global platform...

The biggest problem was exports, we didn't put enough focus and incentives into that area like other nations.
For example Germany 🇩🇪, more than double our population, yet if you look at their car sales all of VW's models ,bar the up, polo and golf ,sold LESS in their home market than the ford falcon or commodore/Camry /aurion
. Ditto BMW ( excluding 3 series)and Mercedes ( excluding A,B and taxi pack C class) As for Audi, I don't think any of their cars outsold the falcon and definitely not the commodore in their home market.
Yet because of exports and govt incentives to do so they sell 10-20 times that figure per model overseas and each and every production line worker is earning more than their equivalent person who just lost their job in Australia........

In Australia, car manufacture has never been feasible without government protection, same as most other countries. The cost of this protection was considered acceptable by the majority of voters from 1915 when it started up to about the 1960s, when improving communications resulted in voters gradually realising how expensive and limited cars were compared to overseas.

Gradually, from then on, large payouts, either by the taxpayer or carbuyers to support a relatively small number of mass production workers and a number of foreign owned manufacturers became less and less acceptable to voters and hence governments. The fact that the foreign manufacturers were slow to change to meet market changes and limited exports by their Australian arm were minor factors.

The big thing that doomed Australian car manufacture from the start was that there never was a successful Australian car manufacturer - only the foreigners were supported, plus Australia has always been difficult for new businesses, plus the small domestic market made it very hard.

For some reason most australians have been led to believe that the Holdens and Fords.....but not the Toyotas are Australian. Ford and Holden have ALWAYS been just as foreign as Toyota.
Toyota, Ford, Holden have NEVER been concerned about the welfare of Australia , only about profits gained from manufacturing.
This weekend still goes to show that many Australians still think their home grown products are racing against each other.
And that's just how the manufacturers want it.
Holden are still having run out sales to rid themselves of the last of the Commodores.
Interesting marketing campaigns ahead......Ford are already a jump ahead with their Mustang......remember when it was pretty good to own a Mustang?
I don't see it as sad that production ends, I see it as a market growing up.

Light at the end of the tunnel, who knows we might see EV manufacturing. Apparently, WA produces more than half of the world's lithium supply.

Car industry revolution fuels Western Australia's lithium boom - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Yep.. a mate just went over to run a Brownfield site...

Ironic isn’t it... Clean Vehicle production.. powered by mined minerals, retrieved by drilling and blasting, mining and hauling - all powered by 10s of thousands of litres of Diesel

And then recharged by products mined and processed....

In the last 30 years or so, I don’t think Holden have produced a vehicle which the average ausi wants to buy.
The last one being the HQ in 1971.
they have made some good cars but not what the average person wants.
Never tried to supply the land cruiser market, which is massive, or was.
I think they have had closure planed for years

Originally Posted by knares

....
they have made some good cars but not what the average person wants.
....

The first Holden was a Chevrolet design, which would have gone into production in about 1943-4 without the war (but was too small for the US in 1946), rather than what Australians (probably) really wanted, which may well have been something more like it was developed into eventually with the HQ. Or perhaps not. Maybe something like the VW (which sold very well when eventually available) or the far more advanced Hartnett, which was killed because it dared to compete with the government backed GM product.

The local manufacturers were constrained increasingly to produce only what their parent companies allowed, and to sell only in export markets that these parents could not more profitably supply from elsewhere. And with Australia's geographic position and tightly constrained shipping, this did not leave much.

Another factor has been the steadily increasing government control of car design and the internationalisation of these controls, which has made the cost of designing a new engine in particular so high that only the largest sales volume can justify it. This obviously has made design of cars for specific markets almost impossible. An interesting way round this is where a manufacturer is more or less privately owned, when it does not have to justify expenditure to shareholders (e.g. Tata).

Originally Posted by knares

In the last 30 years or so, I don’t think Holden have produced a vehicle which the average ausi wants to buy.
The last one being the HQ in 1971.
they have made some good cars but not what the average person wants.
Never tried to supply the land cruiser market, which is massive, or was.
I think they have had closure planed for years

Considering that Commodores outsold any other vehicle in the country for years I don't think that's quite right. Personally I don't think there's been a good Commodore since the VT and their failure to move to making cars people wanted to buy in the last 10 years or so was the beginning of the end - not 30 years ago, that's like saying the last decent Ford ever made was the XA (maybe it was, I don't know)