Quote Originally Posted by Innuendo View Post
Byron the market for what your aiming to own sounds to me to be too small for any of the car companies to care about. Locally your desirable car "could" have been manufactured. But with the shear amount of choice out there with all the imports etc, there is no reason for it to happen. The simply fact of the matter is people of today (me included) are spoiled beyond our dreams of the '70's-'80's and probably even the '90's. We have been geared up to own a new car (or a replacement) every 3 to 5 years. Mobile phones to be trashed before 18 months because of a new gimmick. Cameras to be swapped out because of the drip feeding of features that have been hidden in the digital cameras for years. The list goes on and on.

You can always build a car that suits your specialised requirements. For me, taxing the imports and giving breaks and incentives to local products should always be the Australian way.
I'm a Holden man, but I don't want to see Ford closing it's doors here in Australia. It is the people buying imports that are at least partially to blame.

If a car is built to a competing standard here in our country (and they are) we should all be proud enough to own one.

No import cars in my family!
You are dead right mate, the market is too small. This is why we get a woefully inadequate diesel engine in the current Nissan Patrol - simply our market is too small to justify something better. In this case it is also the Australian Euro emissions laws that create the initial problem, as the 4.2L TD is still sold in the middle east and South Africa but can't comply here, so Nissan just jams that 3.0L 4cyl piece of junk into them and leave the dealers here to try and sell them. They sell that badly they tried to sell me an ST coil cab when I bought the Hilux for something like $37000 drive away with a tray. One drive rules it out though!

But I still reckon if the cars we make here were desirable that people would buy them. The only reason the Commodore can still survive is it can be made in LHD, and the driveline is desirable and familiar in the USA. What they really need to do is get the utes LHD and over on sale as they'll sell well over there.