Ford releases its best-ever Falcon - while trying to ignore the reality that Australians have fallen out of love with their home-grown six-cylinder icons

At the launch of Ford’s new FG Falcon, I went looking for the soothsayer - or his modern day equivalent, the consultant - who I assumed Ford Australia had engaged to present the future of cars and motoring.

Perhaps Ford Australia was sitting on a secret report from this consultant that said global warming will fix itself, hybrids have no future, the Rudd government is going to adopt protectionism as industry policy, the small car boom is but a passing fad, and families have now decided they really don’t need all that space and all those seats in their 4WDs.

Surely Ford has inside information on these issues, I thought, because if this new car is going to restore glory to the Falcon name, it will be on a different planet to the one we currently occupy.

The car itself is not the problem. The FG Falcon yet again shows just how adept Australian automotive engineers are at building globally competitive machinery on antipodean budgets.

The difficulty facing Ford is that Australians may now have fallen deeply and permanently out of love with the big Aussie six. 

Ten years ago the Falcon/Commodore class held 37 per cent of the passenger car market. After a boom decade for new car sales, the Falcon/Commodore class has gone backwards. It now comprises just 11.3 per cent of the market.

Falcon sales for the first three months of 2008 are already down more than 20 per cent on 2007, when they reached 42,390 - a result that was in itself 20 per cent down on 2006.

So things are grim at home, and there’s little joy on the export front either because, unlike Holden and Toyota, Ford has no significant confirmed export program for the Falcon either now or on the medium-term horizon. Such a situation is unsustainable - as Mitsubishi found out in March, when it locked its doors in Adelaide for the last time.

That’s why the FG will be the last all-Australian Falcon. The locally engineered in-line six cylinder will disappear in 2010, as will the Geelong factory that makes it, to be replaced by a V6 imported from the USA.

Ford is reportedly also considering a diesel engine option for the Falcon at around the same time.

Speculation that Ford Australia may be about to do a Mitsubishi and cease local manufacturing altogether is inaccurate, in the medium term at least.

Ford will be building fewer Falcons at Broadmeadows in Melbourne than it used to, but it is taking other steps to try to ensure its survival as a manufacturer.

It will begin local production of the small-medium Focus, which it currently imports, in 2010. It has invested heavily in a strong engineering skills and resources base which, in coming years, will develop other new models, particularly for the Asia/Pacific region. It has carriage of the Ranger ute replacement, for example, and may, like Holden, be given a more prominent role in developing Ford’s future rear-drive cars for the US market.

We’ll give you a brief overview of the FG Falcon range here, but because there is so much ground to cover, we’ve put our in-depth feature on the car’s design, engineering, individual model specifications and drive impressions from the launch at mynrma.com.au/falcon2008.

Initially, you’re probably confused by the new model nomenclature. So were the journalists at the launch.

The base model is still the Falcon XT. Then the range splits into two lines, each with distinctive styling.

The old Falcon-with-extra-fruit Futura, Fairmont and Fairmont Ghia monikers are gone, replaced by the G Series: G6, G6E and G6E Turbo.

E stands for Europe, in case you hadn’t worked it out, while F and G are supposed to evoke the old nameplates. The V8 engine is not available in the G Series. The 4.0-litre six, now with 195kW of power and a five-speed automatic, drives the XT and G6; in the G6E it’s matched with a six-speed auto.

The G6E turbo uses a 270kW turbocharged 4.0-litre/six-speed automatic drivetrain.

A 156kW 4.0/five-speed auto that runs on LPG is also available in XT, G6 and G6E specifications.

The sports side of the Falcon is still the XR6 and XR6 Turbo, while the XR8 is now the sole V8 variant.

The XR6 has the 195kW 4.0-litre, the XR6 Turbo has the 270kW engine and the XR8 runs a 5.4-litre V8, now with 290kW.

The XRs are available with six-speed manual or optional six-speed sequential automatic transmissions. A five-speed auto is also optional on the XR6.

An extensively re-engineered body is stronger and, Ford claims, safer than the BA/BF models.

Ford hoped to put the cream on the launch with an announcement that the FG Falcon had become the first Australian-made car to achieve a five-star ANCAP crash test rating, but it became concerned that the validity of the tests might be called into question if they were done on pre-production models - so the tests are taking place on production cars as you read this. Ford expects that the FG will achieve a five-star ANCAP rating.

Given this prospect, and the cars’ otherwise impressive safety credentials, it is strange that curtain airbags are not standard on the XT, G6 or XRs.

Ford has included stability control across the range, and front seat side/thorax airbags on these specific models, but if you want curtain airbags, to properly protect rear seat occupants from a side impact, you will have to stump up an extra $300.

Curtain airbags are standard in the Commodore and Aurion, which both score four ANCAP stars.

Ford claims average fuel consumption improvements over the previous model BF MkII for all drivetrains, ranging from 1.9 per cent for the 4.0-litre six (now 10.1-10.5L/100km according to Australian standard tests), to 4.9 per cent for the 4.0-litre turbo (now 11.7L/100km) and 6.7 per cent (now 14.0L/100km) for the V8.

Although the new Australian standard, due for introduction later this year, will require specific city and highway fuel consumption figures to be provided by manufacturers, Ford Australia refused to supply those figures to Open Road.

We would suggest you can expect 9-11L/100km on the highway, and 15-17L/100km in town, from the regular 4.0-litre engine.

Carbon dioxide emissions are also high when viewed in the context of changing global benchmarks. The European Commission recently adopted an average CO2 emissions target of 130g per kilometre.

The Falcon’s 4.0-litre engine produces 241-251g of CO2 per kilometre, the 4.0-litre turbo/six speed auto produces 281g/km and the 5.4 V8/six-speed auto produces 334g/km.

Ford has kept RRPs - which start at $36,490 for the XT - comparable with the VE Commodore but, from day one, nobody in their right mind now pays full retail for either car. If the factory isn’t offering thousands of dollars worth of extra equipment for no extra cash in a ‘limited edition’ variant, you can easily negotiate a similar sized discount on the model of your choice.

It’s worth noting too that because the vast majority of Falcons and Commodores are sold to fleets at heavily discounted prices, their trade-in values are among the weakest on the market.

For example, a two-year-old BF Falcon XT automatic, which costs $35,880 new (on-road costs lift this to around $40,000) is now worth just $13,900-$15,500 as a trade in, according to industry valuer Redbook.

If you want to save $20,000-$25,000 on a Falcon, wait two years and buy a used one with 30,000-50,000 km on the clock. If it’s been properly serviced, it will have hardly been run in.

As you’ll see in our model-by-model FG review at mynrma.com.au/falcon2008, it is certainly the best Falcon to date and a revelation to drive, but when it comes to environmental imperatives, the realities of the Australian car market and your hip pocket, it will be battling to make an unsentimental case.

By Bill McKinnon Open Road May/June 2008