It wouldn’t work quite that way if we were building our own brand. But that’s very unlikely to happen. But I doubt we have anything to worry about in the economics. For as long as we have serious capacity in Australia – and all but Mitsubishi are still relatively safe with massive commodity prices inflating our dollar – then we’ll export some reasonable fraction of our output – at least to regional markets and probably the Middle East. And we’ll pick up the odd contract from developed markets.

We exported Falcons and Holdens to Europe in the 1970s (just a few thousand a year., but had we not blown it with the local content plans we may have grown that market to a few tens of thousands).

Interesting. There has been lots of conflicting rumours circulating about the future of Holden’s exporting to the US. There is supposed to be a Canadian plant being built that will make the zeta based cars including the G8, Impala, Camaro and possibly some Buick. Then again one of the Holden execs said Holden would be exporting into the US for the life of the zeta platform IIRC. Another rumour is that Holden will do the engineering for a smaller RWD platform about the recent Torana showcar size.

David, Capri *was* globalisation

It was a top down decision, “market x needs product y where is the cheapest place we can build it?” whereas the import of the Commodore and Astra to the US are examples of established cars in a domestic market which are high quality and fill a hole in the US market – ie bottom up. GM had to go through a cultural change though IMO.

EA was, in my humble opinion a very very appealing piece of design – I remember thinking when I saw it

EA was, in my humble opinion a very very appealing piece of design – I remember thinking when I saw it “If this was a BMW, everyone would be saying how beautiful it was”. As it was people more or less took it for granted it being a mass marketed car and all – and Australian to boot. Ditto the next version of the VX Commodore. Many people don’t realise how much of the mystique of a car is in its marketing and price and volume – something the Europeans were onto right from the start.

EA falcon / button plan. Ford were seriously contemplating a modified Mazda 626 amongst other ideas to replace the Blackwood falcons. It’s easy to forget, but in the 1980′s the GM plan of tarting up Opels was looking like the future. Ford’s HQ were never really convinced that the massive investment involved in the EA was ever going to be justified until they were mollified by the feds in the 1980′s. Rightly or wrongly, Button and the vagaries of his plan (and the end of the fuel crisis) extended motor vehicle manufacturing here by two decades.

Car nut that I am, I’m still not convinced we should even be building cars here any more. Chrysler and Mitsubishi’s ever extended palm requiring grease is a pox on our industrial development.

I thought they were safe here, but was very taken aback to be invited with other consultants to the industry to a briefing by the new Aust CEO who said that he had us there to tell us that Holden was in it for the long haul. Now I would expect that from the CEO of Mitsubishi and to mean the exact opposite of what it said, but was surprised that the Holden CEO even raised it.

I think they’re pretty fazed by the value of the currency and it makes it very hard to export. But they’re doing it, and it looks like Ford may be forced to follow in their wake. Their dilemma (and Ford’s) is that they can’t really supply the large rear wheel segment of the Australian market with an imported car. So they’re at last adopting the posture that makes sense which is to use it as a base from which to export specialist rear wheel cars.

One exciting thing is also that we’re returning to the status we had in the early 1970s as the Asia Pacific headquarters for GM. Holden runs various GM subsidiaries in Asia and is very well regarded in the group – one of the few who’ve made profits when so many other divisions have been losing their shirt.

David, the EA series was well and truly committed well before the Button Plan was introduced.

The Monaro wasn’t too expensive as the GTO in the US. It suffered from Cadillac making the smooth ‘sucked lozenge’ design obsolete. Since the CTS US design has been ‘crinkly’ which the VE fits in with. Didnt help that the Pontiac designers put a frumpy nose on the GTO. Wasn’t rubbishing the Button place, merely saying we are a long way from those policies.

Ford actually tried much harder than GM to globalise – at least initially. They saw Mazda as their small car provider for the US and asia-pacific regions. Products like the Ford Capri (the little convertible) built out of cast-off Mazda bits failed to make any sort of a dent in the US market despite an enormous hype campaign built around it. The last lot of Holdens exported to the US (the Monaro) were too expensive. GM have been content trickling specialists models to the UK or re-badged commodores to the middle east and Africa (there is nothing quite so strange as seeing the familiar silhouette of a Commodore prowling the streets of Johannesburg with Chevy Lumina badges on it).

Also, lets not be too harsh about the Button plan. Holden and Ford would never have started building world class cars without the combination of rationalising of factories and models and dropping tarriffs. They both would have been content on building rubbish euro adaptations (the VB-VL commodore) or tarted up 1960′s dross (the XD-XF Falcon) or assembling CKD kits of outdated Japanese cars behind that massive tarriff wall. The EA Falcon, once sorted, was a massive advance and wouldn’t have happened without the Button plan. The massive success of those Falcons is why the Commodore is now so good.