Was reading and thinking of this foR years, how would you feel if no cars were manufactured in Australia

Personally I find it devastating but economiccally it makes no sense to keep proping up a heamoraging private sector.

Reasonable compromise would be to keep the engenieering here and restructure the factories to assemble knock up kits as they did in the 1970s. Wasn't the best but cheaper than building complete cars.

Thoughts?

Just to give a bit if perspective. I know members on
Here sell cars, build cars or ate involved in supply and manufactur of parts supplied to these manufacturers.
Growing up down the road from the old Nissan plant in westal, I witnessed the decline and death of that plant over the years as school friends parents worked there. They left before it shut down and moved out of the area.

I like the falcons over the commodores(except the sports wagon that handles better than sedan variant) and the corollas are better than the camrys unfortunately.

So I'm not banging the industry or products, but really Holden is the only one to adapt with the cruise. If the others don't start adapting to making cars we want, at prices affordable to masses, the industry needs a wake up.

But wouldn't that cause the price of cars to rise? Look how much it costs to import an $2 seal ... better to build it locally.

And then think how hard it would be to get quality, cars designed for the unique temperatures of AUS and the like of Aussies.

manufacturing shut down in NZ and then came the flood of 2nd hand Jap imports, opened up a whole new selection of cars, some very cool, but did also bring a whole lot of sh1te as well.

Sad to say but the high AUD and strong, militant unions are killing manufacturing in Aus. I just don't think they realise what they are competing against..

I think it will be a sad day when cars are no longer produced here. I now work at Volkswagen rather than Ford so I'm less concerned by this issue than I was a few months ago but it's still not good.
Personally I think Ford will definately stop building locally first, followed by Holden and then eventually Toyota. We were hearing rumblings from Ford employees for the last 12 months about the future. Apparently there has been no new Falcon model designed for post 2015. When you consider that everything Ford builds here is off the Falcon platform, that spells danger!
I just hope enough of the Falcon Ecoboost 2.0L turbo engines get out into the market before Ford winds up as this will be the next big thing in conversion engines - 175kW turbo rear wheel drive engine in auto or manual capable of a lot more power, huge aftermarket support as it's available in America and Europe as well - awesome!!
Back on topic though, the only way for the local produces to survive is to either develop an export opportunity or to hope that you're the last man standing and rely upon Australias loyalty to an Aussie built car!

i used to work at shefenacker/visiocorp and we used to make all kinds of electronic and plastic parts for cars (mainly ford and holden) but the price of importing asian parts compared to molding our own killed it, largest employer in town got shut down by the super cheap asian work force, just simply cannot compete with pay when it cost $500 per week for an aussie or $20 a week in asia.

We should start building A10 powered tuk tuks,
Id love to drift them :)