The government is handling it wrong, and the people of Australia are thinking it wrong. As with any corporate companies including big automotive companies like GM and Ford, EBITDA is key to maintaining profitability and sustainability, and they are not achieving that in Australia due to high costs and competitive market. Then the wisest decision is to close production and move elsewhere where production costs are cheaper.

This I see is the future of Holden and Ford in Australia unfortunately, love it or not.

What the people of Australia needs to start thinking is, there are better cars out there than Holden and Ford of Australia. So importing isn't such a bad idea if they are affordable.

The Australian government has to start handling local car manufacturing and taxes for imported car like countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Both have local manufacturing plants around the countries to produce cars of imported as well as local brands. This created jobs which is good for the local economy, however import duty taxes for cars not made in the country is around 150-250% of the RRP of the car.

What they did do though is, for companies which could not justify the costs of setting up plant to built the entire car, they could setup up an assembly plant to handle CKD (Complete-Knocked-Down) built cars. Parts for the cars are imported into the country and local plants assembled all the parts together to produce a completed car. This is more cost effective and creates even more local jobs for the economy. Since the imported cars were assembled and rolled off local plants, they do not carry the same import duty tax as a fully imported cars.

As much as I love cars and love Australia and would like to see automotive manufacturing in Australia excels, it just won't happen with the current modelling. For us to excel though this is what we need:

1) Impose higher import tax for fully imported vehicles
2) Tax exemption if vehicles are built locally or assembled locally through CKD model
3) This will create and protect more local car manufacturing jobs

As for the Holden nameplate itself, we could still have Commodore, it might just come from one of the better models off GM stablemate and parts imported into Australia which are sourced from cheaper countries, and Holden plant in Elizabeth to assemble them together with a Holden badge.

I seriously don't mind driving a Holden-badged Cadillac ATS, XTS, CTS and CTS-V.

Posted 2 months ago

If you haven't notice, this resembles the CT200H from sister company Lexus more than Hyundai, and the new i30 actually came out after the CT200H.

So shouldn't that suggest Hyundai i30 is copying the rear design of Lexus CT200H from which the new Corolla are inspired from?

Posted 9 months ago

Totally agree, this design is unique and not as "generic" as say the VW Golf, it at least is going to stand out (good or bad in the eyes of the public) as a Corolla.

Also diesel is a must to at least be competitive. I know I will get one if they come in diesels.

Posted 9 months ago