What went wrong with Australia's car industry

Australians. they prefer Chinese cars and FWD. Chrysler proved that Americans still wanted RWD despite GM and Ford having largely given up on that segment outside of coupes.

>>28499907 (OP)
Made shit people didn't want to buy at prices people didn't want to pay.

>>28499907 (OP)
Jews. They took out the legendary ceos and replaced them with Jews and they closed it.

gm tried to get the australian government to foot the bill for buying hyundai, government told them to fuck off, gm shut down holden out of spite. ford idk i guess they just took the opportunity to get out quietly and ran.

Yank parent companies, car reviewers in the msm taking money to lie about how amazing volkswagen is, car manufacturers marketing SUVs hard (we mainly made 6 or 8cyl 4 door sedans and wagons, as well as 2 door utes) and NPCs bought it up. Now if you want the same kind of power, comfort and reliability falcodores got you for ~$40k, you're spending $100k+ on German executive sedans

>>28499970
What's rarely mentioned is that they both had an image problem. Nobody who buys European would tolerate being associated with westies and bogans, no matter how good or expensive the car is,

>>28499907 (OP)
Media psyops to push people away from 'gas guzzling' rwd sedans in favour of 'economic' crossovers (which were at most only 10% better on fuel), paired with the perception that falcons and commodores were for bogans and old people.
Rising manufacturing costs from unions.
Ford/GM headquarters stealing all the profits to take back to America and purposefully putting the Australian divisions in a bad state to hopefully get bailout money from Aus government.

>>28499907 (OP)
wages too high

>>28499990
>perception

>>28500014
Yes, perception. There is an entire country outside of Campbelltown/Dubbo etc...

>>28500028
sorry but I live in mandurah and nearly everyone with a falcon or commodore is a bogan

YEAH IVE GOT AN XR6 FALCON

>>28500028
I think anon was implying it’s not really a perception but rather a recognised pattern.

the same thing that happened to all australian industry: destroyed by bureaucracy, apathy and traitors

>>28500079
>Western Australia
Makes sense. And the average falcon/commodore still on the road today is 20+ years old. Of course they are all going to be driven by housos.

>>28499907 (OP)
Gooks entered the market and naturally took their market share, since corporations are never allowed to see negative growth the big wigs decided to can the whole project rather than downsize production.
Of course Australia's strict labour laws without tariffs didn't help.

>>28499907 (OP)
Geriatrics motivated by national pride bought them new and drove them for a decade before selling them to bogans. Terrible business model. Slow turn over and your brand image is tarred by the used buyer demographic.

>>28499907 (OP)
The Aborigines sniffing up all the petrol made it economically unfeasible for most Australians to own a V8

Holden suffered from a critical lack of domesticity derived shitboxes.
so pretty much had to badge engineer everything.

>>28499910
Australians prefer japanese cars

>inb4 the inevitable corporate bootlicker comes into the thread whinging about unions and assembly line workers on 80k/year like it was an unfathomably large salary in Aus in 2014

>>28499986
This IMO is a big part of it. Foreigners will struggle to understand but Australia has (or at least, had) a big problem with "cultural cringe". Anything home grown and domestically produced was snubbed by most of the populace as being somehow inferior or worse than something produced overseas, no matter where it came from. People were embarrassed to drive Falcons and Commodores as there was a heavy bogan connotation. It wasn't even a money thing either since you could drive a Camry or Aurion and be less derided than someone with a Holden or Ford. To be fair Aussie cars built in the 80s and earlier were really quite rubbish.

Ultimately it's a shame though because the last few models that Ford Aus and Holden produced were fantastic. Just big comfortable cars with stout engines that made good power and were affordable for the common man. They were dead easy to maintain yourself and didn't have half the issues that you would expect out of a German import on the eve of hitting 100,000km.

>>28501981
Who can forget the 250kw v8 AU T3s with double wishbones all around and leather interiors back in 2000

>>28501995
>and 1800kg

>>28499907 (OP)
cucked to America's car industry and repealed all the legislation that let them keep their manufacturing sector.

>>28502019
They felt half their weight, they were so fucking dialled in thanks to Tickford magic. But yes, they are a big comfy car with space in the cabin and a big boot.

>>28501981
The thing that people who talk about cultural cringe consider is that maybe australian culture IS shallow and embarrassing.

>>28502031
don't consider*

>>28499990
>Ford/GM headquarters stealing all the profits to take back to America and purposefully putting the Australian divisions in a bad state to hopefully get bailout money from Aus government.
An often-overlooked part of how US corpos treated their Ozzie branches.

Detroit.

The Australian based management of Holden and Ford knew which way the wind was blowing since the early 90's and tried everything they could to solidify their arms into their global counterparts to prevent this exact scenario.

Ford AU tried tying the development of the Falcon to the Mustang, developing other cars off Falcon architecture (mid sized cars, SUVs, dual cab utes, etc), investing into their engines, and exporting high performance Falcons as police interceptors. All of these were quashed by Head Office before they could eat too heavily into the tribute they demanded, but survivor projects that made it to market include the Barra, the Boss V8 (that would make its way into the Ford GT) and the Territory.

Holden had more success, due to the fact that they had a champion in the boardroom in Bob Lutz. When Lutz assumed his position in the mid 90's, he did a global tour of every arm of GM and was very impressed by the then new VT Commodore he drove. He was blown away by the fact that despite being full of parts bin components that he could recognise by sound and touch, it was put together better and drove better than any GM product outside of the current Cadillac or Corvette. While Lutz was on the board, Holden would get export contracts. However, whenever they would stray from their lane and try to build something else the market was demanding, they would be forced to abandon their local effort and help instead contribute to whatever GM was cooking at the time. The worst example of this was being forced to abandon a Kappa platform (Pontiac Solstice) RWD mid sized car to fund the development of the Chevy Cruze.

Refusal from Detroit to allow their Australian arms to develop and build anything that the local or international markets might actually want in the near future, combined with a culture of blackballing anyone who tried to do something about it (John Cadogan being the loudest/latest example) doomed automotive manufacturing in this country.

I don't think there is a single western country with australia's population that makes cars for mostly domestic consumption. They dropped big money on sedans right before SUV/Trucks took over the world.

>>28502024
Normal AU is 1500
The IRS v8s aren't worth it

>>28502043
Oz was also extremely unlucky due to US head offices deciding to prioritize investments into South Korea (see GM/Daewoo) over modernizing/strenghtening their existing Australian branches.

Well every single car made here was gay as fuck, how's that for a start?

>>28499907 (OP)
It was built on the power of Opel

>>28502058
IRS XR6 VCT then with the T5 (my last car) that bhp special steel actually made AUs light compared to other falcodores

>>28499907 (OP)
Corporate greed

>>28502043
i like to imagine that there's an alternate dimension/universe where the aus govt said 'fuck it we give as much shits about this being legal as you guys gave about us' and made a local car company with the former staff of ford and holden who then got to make some absolutely wild cars that would've made those that cried about the supercar scare back in the 70s unable to ever sleep at night again