Ford Gone!!!!! (CONFIRMED)

[GTRMagic]

A reminder too... the Falcon will cease production in 8 weeks' time..

Forever...

[Airhead]

Originally Posted by GTRMagic

A reminder too... the Falcon will cease production in 8 weeks' time..

Forever...

an absolute tragedy for those of us with a sentimental bent. Having said that, after about almost twenty years of Falcon/Fairmont ownership we have a Rangie and a Fiesta in the garage. So people like me are to blame...

[Lukeyson]

Originally Posted by GTRMagic

A reminder too... the Falcon will cease production in 8 weeks' time..

Forever...

It will get me right in the feels when that time comes, and all on Bathurst week too !!!!

My BF GT and XR50t will stay in my driveway for many years to come !

[dsg]

Originally Posted by Lukeyson

My BF GT and XR50t will stay in my driveway for many years to come !

Broken down again?

[ford71]

[GTRMagic]

The Fat Lady Is Getting Ready To Sing

[Joe5619]

Originally Posted by GTRMagic

The Fat Lady Is Getting Ready To Sing

What did that article say?? Can't see without subscription

[GTRMagic]

Originally Posted by Joe5619

What did that article say?? Can't see without subscription

Originally Posted by The Australian, Feature Story 2/10/16 by Chip Le Grand

Ford prepares to turn off lights at Broadmeadows

An era ends.

At about 10am next Friday, the last Ford built in Australia will reach George Profalis at the end of the Broadmeadows assembly line. ­Fittingly, it will be a Falcon; a six-cylinder, rear-wheel drive emblem of sunburnt suburbia once found in every second driveway, now loved by precious few.

Profalis and his team of six workers will perform the final tasks to complete the shiny blue XR6 before it is driven off the ­assembly line and the lights dim on 91 years of Australian manufacturing. First they’ll balance the wheels, then they’ll test the electronics and, finally, they’ll check the ­balance on the drive shaft.

After so many shifts across so many years, they could do all of it blindfolded. Instead, they’ve arrived at this day, 3½ years since Ford announced it would stop building cars in Australia, with eyes wide open.

Profalis started work at Ford’s sprawling Broadmeadows plant as a teenager in 1985. His ­father, Jack, came to Australia from Greece and worked for Ford for 27 years. His uncles worked on the Broady assembly line, too. ­George Profalis knows it will be different for his 13-year-old triplets, Jack, Marcus and Rocco. “We laugh about it,” he says. “I say, ‘Youse ­better go to school, get an education, because there are no jobs at Ford.’ ”

Under the vast, flat roof of the late 1950s plant opened by ­Victoria’s longest serving premier, Henry Bolte, there is disappointment and sadness that this day has arrived. There is also a sense of pride, both in the way the company has supported its workers through the closure and the quality of cars still being built.

When Ford Australia boss Bob Graziano declared on May 23, 2013, that local production had reached the end of the line, about 700 of 900 employees crammed into the Broadmeadows canteen for the announcement. Of those, 480 assembly plant workers, mainly the more experienced ones, have stayed on to build the last Falcons and Territories.

"The final XR6 will be the 4,356,228th vehicle built at Broadmeadows and 6,048,996th Ford built in Australia"

Plant manager Andrew Higginbotham says it should be the best car they’ve ever made. His workers fervently agree.

“Sometimes I get to drive other cars,” says Richard Zabielski, a process engineer who will retire on October 7. “You say to yourself, ‘This is nowhere near as good as a Ford or a Territory.’ ”

Adds Profalis: “We build a good car, mate. I have had probably five Territories. Family car. Mate, knock on wood, they have been beautiful for me.”

Zabielski is Ford’s longest serving employee. The son of a Ford worker, he went to school at Broady tech and at the end of form four started work in the Ford body shop as an apprentice fitter and turner on $18 a week.

Back then, Ford took on hundreds of apprentices; everything from mechanics to pastry chefs.

It was 1970, the first year of the legendary XY Falcon.

“It was like a city,” Zabielski says. “It just ran like a big machine. There is people everywhere. You were a bit worried about getting lost because the place was so big. You are virtually a baby when you come into this place.”

Three years down the track from Ford’s announcement, an announcement since echoed by Holden and Toyota, it is difficult to argue with the decision to cease production in Australia.

Australians love cars. There are more than 18 million registered on our roads. Last year, we bought 1.155 million new ones, more than any year before. Yet of these, fewer than 100,000 were built in Aust­ralia. Of these, only 5938 were Ford Falcons.

These numbers are the endpoint of a long, complex and contested story: the decision more than 30 years ago to embark on a staged, unilateral removal of ­auto­motive tariffs; the withdrawal of Nissan and Mitsubishi from local carmaking; the ­frag­mentation of a small, distant market flooded by more imported makes than are sold across the entire US, the impact of the global fin­ancial crisis; the Australian dollar soaring high off the back of the mining boom; the political wind change against industry assistance.

“Sometimes there I’ve come across some accountants or a few people like this that don’t believe in supporting industries such as this,” says Terry McKiernan, 62, an industrial trainer who started at Ford’s Geelong stamping plant as a 16-year-old apprentice. “I don’t think they really understand.”

By next Friday, Ford’s engine, panel stamping and casting plants in Geelong, the site where the Ford Motor Company in 1925 established its first Australian production line inside an old wool­shed, also will cease production. By day’s end, about 600 employees at Broadmeadows and Geelong will have worked their last shift.

On the day that Graziano broke the news to Ford workers in Broadmeadows, Geelong plant manager Kevin Brown — KB as he is known to everyone at Ford — stood on a box to address his team in Geelong. There weren’t many questions from the floor.

“The facts were reasonably easy to understand,” he says. An A3 piece of paper still pinned up outside Brown’s office lists his guiding principles adopted to manage the closure: no compromise on safety, continuous improvement in their work, doing everything they can to help workers find other jobs.

Now that October 7 has nearly arrived, Brown is one of the few Ford workers who doesn’t know what he’ll do next. He knows only that he will be needed at Ford, at least for the rest of the year, to help decommission Geelong’s landmark factory. When people ask Brown’s wife about his plans, she jokes he’ll be the last one to leave Ford after turning out the lights.

Trainer McKiernan’s introduction to Ford 45 years ago reflects a Geelong that has all but disappeared; a once-thriving hub of heavy industry replaced by a diverse, regional economy driven by health, education and other service industry jobs.

No sooner had McKiernan walked out of his last class at the old Geelong technical college in Moorabool Street in the heart of the town than he received three competing job offers: from Ford, Alcoa and Winstanley Bell & Co, a local engineering firm. Now Winstanley is long gone and Alcoa closed its ageing Point Henry aluminium smelter in 2014, its lot cursed by the surging Aussie dollar and falling global metal ­prices.

McKiernan says Ford’s closure announcement was a shock but also a relief after years of falling production and speculation that local manufacturing was doomed. “You sort of had the feeling it was coming anyhow,” he says. For McKiernan, early retirement beck­ons at age 62. He says it will make him sad whenever he drives past the red-brick factory on the road into Geelong. “Then again, if I have my grandkids in the car with me, I’ll probably be pretty proud to say that is where I worked for 45 years.”



October 7 is the beginning of the end of carmaking in Australia, with Toyota and Holden ceasing production at Altona, Fisherman’s bend and Elizabeth by the end of next year. When the factory doors are all shut in Melbourne and Adelaide, more than 5000 assembly line jobs will be entombed. These are merely the last of the lay-offs. Between 2006 and 2012, Ford shed more than 1300 people from Broadmeadows and Geelong as production quotas fell.

The full impact on Australia’s automotive component makers will not be felt immediately when the last Falcon is built. As Federation of Automotive Products Manufacturers manager Tom Chappell explains, aside from a handful of satellite plants of big suppliers that service Ford in Broadmeadows and Geelong, few auto suppliers are reliant on Ford any more.

“The big one is when Holden and Toyota finish,’’ he says. By the time that happens, ­between 28,000 and 40,000 jobs will have lopped from the auto­motive supply chain, most of which is made up of small to medium-sized businesses in Melbourne’s north and southeast suburbs.
Industry observers know which businesses will survive and which will die.

To stay in the automotive game, parts makers need to secure a place in the global supply chain; to sign medium-term contracts to sell com­ponents to car­makers overseas. It takes about five years from first contact to secure such a deal. If companies aren’t already well down this road it is too late

“If a company hadn’t done ­anything about winning export contracts until they heard the ­announcement from Ford, they would have pretty much Buckley’s chance of landing any production contracts because of the timelines involved,” Chappell says. “If you can imagine pruning a tree right back, you cut off all the branches and are just left with the trunk and a few measly shoots; that is what we are going to have.”

Against this barren landscape, there is good news at Ford. ­Although manufacturing will cease at Geelong and Broad­meadows, Ford is not closing entirely. Since the 2013 announcement, the company has invested in its research and development ­capacity in Geelong and its Asia-Pacific Development Centre in Broadmeadows. More than 1000 people will be employed at Broadmeadows, including about 160 redeployed from assembly-line jobs. Once Holden and ­Toyota cease production, Ford will again become Australia’s largest automotive employer.

The twin development centres, along with Ford’s proving ground in the You Yangs northeast of Geelong, are important not only for the people they employ but what they represent. The Ford ­Everest, a newly released SUV model, and Ford Ranger, a popular pick-up truck, were designed and engineered at Geelong and Broadmeadows. This provided work not only for Ford engineers but for 19 component makers who secured supply contracts for the vehicles.

One of those companies is Melbourne manufacturer MTM, which supplies automatic gear shifts for the Ranger and Everest models from its South Oakleigh factory. MTM managing director Mark Albert read the signs earlier than most about the future of Australian carmaking. In 1992, armed with an economics and accounting degree, he took the family business from his father, Max, a toolmaker by trade. It was the year Nissan ceased production and Australia was in the grip of the recession we had to have. Albert had to lay off a third of his workforce and vowed never again.

In 1992, Ford sold upward of 60,000 Falcons and Fairlanes. The sales figures belied a financial squeeze already being felt by the company. Albert began exploring opportunities to supply overseas carmakers and reduce his company’s reliance on local manufacturers. His breakthrough came in 1997 when MTM won a contract to supply door checks to Cadillac.

Albert says October 7 will have a negligible impact on his business, but it is important that Ford keeps its engineering presence in Aust­ralia. “If Ford and GM took their engineering elsewhere in the world it would make it more difficult for them internationally to buy from us because they need that support,’’ he says.

Suzanne McConchie was one of the first Ford workers in Geelong to be redeployed from manufacturing to product development. In her old job, she was part of the management team briefed about the closure the day before it was announced. She spent a sleepless night, unable to tell her husband, Patrick, who also works for Ford in Geelong, why she was so upset. Since then, she has had responsibility for every new Ford launched in the Asia-Pacific. She oversees a team of managers spread across Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, China and India. Ford China sold 1.1 million cars last year.

“In terms of engineering knowledge, Ford Australia is leading that for the region,” she says. “The knowledge that we have got here, on how to make cars, is incredible. We are training the other countries to learn what we know but that seems to be taking longer than anyone thought.”

Patrick McConchie recently learned he’d also landed a job with Ford in product development. The couple were ex­pecting their first baby today.

“I can’t deny the fact that it will be a sad day,’’

Boris Zoroje says carmaking now is unrecognisable from the scene that con­fronted him 40 years ago when he first went to work with Ford at the Broadmeadows body show. Back then, the Ford workplace was vib­rantly multilingual, with new arrivals from Turkey, Greece, Italy, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Ford built its factory in Broadmeadows for this reason: to draw skilled and unskilled labour from the migrant workers who lived in the suburb’s new housing commission. Zoroje’s family came to Melbourne from Croatia. His father soon got a job with Ford and Boris joined him when he turned 18.

There was plenty of work, even if it was hot, dirty and at times dangerous. Carmaking was labour intensive. Cars were assembled manually, with welding guns suspended above revolving platforms drawn with a chain.

“The operators physically had to jump on to the platform, grab the suspended guns and stitch up a car virtually, then jump off and then go on to the next platform,” Zoroje explains. “This continually went on for the eight-hour shift. You look at the automation today where there are hardly any drawn conveyors. There are loading ­fixtures where people no longer weld; they pick up a number of parts, load them into a fixture, step back and press the ‘cycle complete’ button and robots take over.

“There is no hopping on and off, there are no labour-intensive tasks. The safety is paramount. It is clean, well lit, quiet.”

Zoroje will work his final shift as a senior process coach on Friday. After 40 years earning a good, reliable wage, his retirement is well planned, but the feeling will be bittersweet when that final car rolls off the line. Since his first day on the job on June 2, 1976, Zoroje has acquired a vast knowledge of manufacturing processes; hydraulics and mnemonics, robotics and conveyor systems, quality systems, logistics. He wonders: without companies such as Ford building cars in Australia, how will tomorrow’s workers learn what he has learned?

“I can’t deny the fact that it will be a sad day,” he says. “Even if I have to go I would still love to see Ford Motor Company continue. I have made a life out of it, I can’t see why someone else couldn’t.”

The human impact will be immense..

The Supercar bods are aware of it, Mr Winterbottom has mentioned it several times in different interviews.

The human impact will be immense..

[Samwhk]

That was a really well written story. I hope FoMoCo are putting on a good Bathurst party for the boys and girls.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[GTRMagic]

[GTRMagic]

And its done.. the last Ford Falcon ever to be made in Australia

[ForumNick]

The last three cars off the line will be raffled off to workers at the Broadmeadows assembly plant as a parting gift...

[Mixer]

Originally Posted by ForumNick

The last three cars off the line will be raffled off to workers at the Broadmeadows assembly plant as a parting gift...

Wonder when the auctions will start?

[GTRMagic]

Originally Posted by Mixer

Wonder when the auctions will start?

Its a lottery giveaway, not a prize thingumy

[GTRMagic]

[Tourer]

PRA evaluating what model Ford to race in 2018:http://www.speedcafe.com/2016/10/08/...r-replacement/

[GTRMagic]

Jeez Ford have really been pushing the Mondeo ads the last couple of days...

[GTRMagic]

Mustang Gets 2 Star ANCAP Safety Rating

[mayhem]

Prodrive launch Mustang with hopes of a race going version in the future

[Mixer]

2 stars, man the Yanks still can't build a car to save themselves.

I guess from the land where it still isn't compulsory to wear a seatbelt, its OK!

[minheim]

ANCAP testing has changed. Under the new testing and measurements what was a 5 star would achieve a 2 star or thereabouts now. The story is typical journo headline bait.

[Umai Naa]

Airbags not inflating correctly, resulting in heads contacting the dash and steering wheel is a pretty serious thing.

[peckstar]

Originally Posted by minheim

ANCAP testing has changed. Under the new testing and measurements what was a 5 star would achieve a 2 star or thereabouts now. The story is typical journo headline bait.

is that correct, i thought i would google that to see what the new regulations are and what i have found suggests the new rules dont come into 2018.

Pictures of the car looked bad, it would put me off buying one (even though i want one)

[minheim]

Until they test other cars against the new revised and stricter ANCAP regime we are looking at apples and oranges.

[minheim]

Yes the new testing comes in as mandatory in 2018, but the mustang test wasn't done to the current Australian test standard it was done to Euro standard.