Sure sign Rossi is feeling his age

AJV80 said:

The super boring cars are very stale. They haven't changed much in the last 10 years or more other than the new brands joining the series.

I agree with the quality of locally made cars, they are crap. I bought a BMW 335i coupe a few years ago. The features, how it drives and the power ..... all over the locally made cars and i have never looked back.

Its sad to lose our locally made car industry but they have tied their own noose with the lack of quality and new concepts. They churn out the same old tired boring designs year after year.

When you compare what Japan has delivered in the car industry let alone the motorcycle industry in terms of development, price and performance to our locally made cars that still offer bloody pushrod engines, is it any wonder why?

Click to expand...

Absolutely agree it's a shame that Holden and Ford will no longer locally make cars but it's their own fault. Well I can't attribute the blame completely on them as unions driving wages up has made their factories somewhat uncompetitive price wise but the big thing is the fact that they're so far behind other manufacturers due to no vision. I remember when the VE came out and it was supposed to be a game changer but it offered nothing better than any other manufacturer(other than probably ford Australia) did and did it was at a premium price.

I'm sad that I don't see it as a particularly big loss that we won't have Commodores anymore because there's nothing special about Holden(or Fords) current local line up. They don't look that great, there's no good 2 doors, their performance isn't anything special either. It's a shame that we won't have them anymore but it's a much bigger shame that it's not a real loss.

Now that I think about it the loss of the Aussie ute is the only thing that makes it a sad day.

AJV80 said:

The super boring cars are very stale. They haven't changed much in the last 10 years or more other than the new brands joining the series.

I agree with the quality of locally made cars, they are crap. I bought a BMW 335i coupe a few years ago. The features, how it drives and the power ..... all over the locally made cars and i have never looked back.

Its sad to lose our locally made car industry but they have tied their own noose with the lack of quality and new concepts. They churn out the same old tired boring designs year after year.

When you compare what Japan has delivered in the car industry let alone the motorcycle industry in terms of development, price and performance to our locally made cars that still offer bloody pushrod engines, is it any wonder why?

Click to expand...

Well... it's a bit hard to fund an industry like that with such a small, isolated market. It's the same story for all manufacturing in Aus, except some food manufacturing, it's just business reality. Nobody's fault.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Cool Blue said:

Well... it's a bit hard to fund an industry like that with such a small, isolated market. It's the same story for all manufacturing in Aus, except some food manufacturing, it's just business reality. Nobody's fault.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Click to expand...

A close mate was an engineer for Holden before he flipped to mining. He sort of explained a lot of the issues they have with the points you mentioned, small isolated markets, wages and manufacturing costs per unit sold, even their geographical location was a disadvantage for distribution.

He explained a lot of the things they where trying to do to save costs as they where brining the VE commodore online with getting cheaper interior parts that didn't really matter to much made in China. He told me this story of how they sent a complete statesman over to this manufacturer in China with instructions to make a complete copy of it without engine and drive train of course. He had some photos of the car they sent back it was quite funny, it only took them a couple months and they had this complete slightly ........ looking Statesman. Overall though he thought the quality of it wasn't too bad actually. Headlights, interior and things like that looked cheap and felt ....... But how do you really compete with companies in China like that when it comes to building costs and justify 3 times the cost for only a 30% quality improvement.

When you have a market where the top selling car is circa 40K volume, it's a case of export or perish.
If your headquarters support this (a la Toyota), then you can scrape by. If they don't (a la Ford and to a slightly lesser extent Holden), then an AUD above parity with the USD (wasn't so long ago..) is going to hurt you. The consolidation of manufacturing and engineering centres by the Michigan HQs following the GFC didn't help either. Nor did the lack of vision mentioned earlier in the thread. Nor did the lack of quality in such a competitive market. Nor did the lack of coherent, stabilising government policy.
tl;dr version: Lots of factors involved. Still a real pity.

(Oh and there's a fair few WH and WM (Royaum/Park Avenues) kicking about over here in Shanghai)