SYDNEY: Summernats festival held on the first weekend of every January also offers a revealing insight into why Australian-made cars are on a downward slide, based on a Drive poll of more than 100 attendees.
Much like the Bathurst 1000, Summernats is Falcon-versus-Commodore heartland. Large sedans are as de rigueur as thongs, tattoos and sunburn during the four-day festival in Canberra’s northern suburbs. So when less than half the people Drive spoke to said they’d consider buying the latest Commodore or Falcon it paints a clear picture of why the locally-made cars are on the way out.
It’s clear that even at the holy grail of internal combustion, there’s already been a shift away from locally-produced large cars. Many proud hot rod and show car owners tow their vehicles into the Exhibition Park complex behind imported dual cab utes and SUVs, and for the first time, a rotary-engine vehicle took out this year’s coveted Grand Champion mantle: an immaculately presented Datsun 1200 Ute, something that would have been considered sacrilege in the early days of the 28-year-old event.
Organisers say more than 109,000 people attended this year’s Summernats festival, with 1900 vehicles entered into various show car judging and burnout competitions. Of those, preliminary organiser figures reveal only roughly 20 percent of cars entered wore a Holden badge, while 10 percent were locally-produced Fords.
Drive visited last weekend’s event in the last ever Ford Falcon XR8, along with a matching Holden Commodore SS-V Redline, to gauge the feeling of some of the country’s most avid enthusiasts. In some regards, both vehicles are on a hiding to nothing in showrooms, with Ford and Holden due to shutter their manufacturing operations within the next three years.
While 70 per cent polled said they owned a Falcon or Commodore, only 43 per cent of those said they would consider buying the updated model before both Ford and Holden cease their manufacturing operations in Australia.
Why? In the case of the Falcon, the majority of respondents said there wasn’t enough changes or updates in the new model to warrant upgrading. Another 15 per cent said they baulked at the FG X because of the recent omission of the XR8 Ute and various station wagon variants.
In the case of both Holden and the Ford, 80 per cent of pollsters agreed large cars had simply lost their appeal among buyers because of the competitiveness of the import market, not because they were any less relevant.
“You can go out and buy a Hyundai i30 for little more than 20 grand, and the quality of that type of imported car has come a long way,” said a respondent.
“I love the Commodore but I’ve had such a good run with Toyotas over the years that I wouldn’t change,” said another.
Only 35 per cent of respondents felt that people had shied away from large cars because of their inferior fuel use (both the four-cylinder EcoBoost Falcon and 3.0-litre V6 Commodore now consume under 8.5L/100km combined).
Meanwhile, others had shied away from both Holden and Ford models due to poor experiences.
“We wouldn’t even consider a Holden or Ford anymore,” one couple said. “They’re not well put together, they just fall apart. We’ve had Mazdas lately and wouldn’t have anything else.”
The overriding consensus among 85 per cent of respondents was that locally-produced large cars were simply too expensive for the average buyer. It seems their sentiment is shared by the majority of Australians, with sales figures this week revealing Ford suffered a 10th straight year of decline in 2014, while Holden posted its worst annual result in nearly a quarter of a century during the same period.
