Quote:
Originally Posted by FormulaFG
Unfortunately Australia never owned its auto industry.
All the manufacturers here were foreign owned. It makes complete sense that they would look after jobs in their respective motherlands before looking after our jobs, and why good ideas and products we came up with here were never given proper traction and funding for export.
I've often thought Holden's birth doomed it from the start. The idea behind Holden was 100% correct, but the federal government should have set up an Australian manufacturer from scratch. It should have been made very clear to GM or any other manufacturer if they wanted to be involved they would be paid for their help but would NOT have any ownership of the business.
Had this happened it would have stayed in Australian hands. Would have been able to sell cars to any country in the world that wanted to buy them, without having to get "permission" from another country and we may still have a productive auto industry today.
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That sounds good but such a car would be just backwards crap like the Russians made, the Yanks were so far advanced in making cars and we got a most advanced car in it's day when we got the 1949 FX Holden.
Look at our first Falcon XK in 1961 as well, it was so advanced in it's day as well.
Look at the 1962 RV1 Valiant as well, that made the Holden and Ford look like crap in it's day.
If you look at Aussie cars that we made they were siting on their **** some what and when the Jap imports came about they had to lift their game to keep up, thanks that we could use the UK Ford escort or Cortina or the Gemni etc etc. it cost X $ to bring out a new car and around 2 years to make just that money back then you make some profit and then you have to spend $ on the next model and on it goes. look at South America Fords they could not afford to up date there cars so they were stuck with the XK Falcon body style being made from 1960's to 1982.
Look at our Ford F100's they did not bring out the C20 Chevy to go head to head, Chev failed at that attempt so how could we make such to deal with such a thing.
When we look at engines even Holden were backwards from 1976 struggling to make way with what they had making small advancement at that let along build any engine from scratch, hell even the Japs engines were first made by CWC in the USA as they build all the castings and kick off the very starting process and then had that over to the Japs to start building them from their on, our first FX Holden's were cast with CWC and then later with GMH. Australia could never build an engine block form the start not even our Holden V8 was totally Australian and our Ford X Flow was done by the help of the Yanks who came here, same with the Ford OHC 6 CYL.