| |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
     |
2007 Sydney International Motor Show GALLERY See bottom of page for Images Well, the 2007 Sydney International Motor Show held at the Darling Harbour Exhibition Centre has been and gone, and we were there to taste what was there to offer - at least from a Ford point of view! And to be honest, as a Falcon fan the Ford stand was an huge disappointment. Instead, there were Mondeo's everywhere as well as the Focus & even Fiesta - leaving a poultry five spaces to be given to the Falcon or any of it's derivatives. - And amongst those five, only one silver XR8 ute stood to represent the Falcon's two-door offerings. That's right - no RTV, no XLS (not even a Tornado or Pursuit ute!) and not a Falcon tray to be seen anywhere. Other than that, the Falcon offerings included one Cobra, one XR8 sedan, one plain white ( ! ) Typhoon & a light green metallic Fairmont Ghia. With the Typhoon in taxi-white it was easy to walk past it without a second look - not a colour I would have chosen to make a statement! Even the newly introduced F6 X 270 (FPV Typhoon) managed to look absolutely ...yawn - boring... in it's also-white paintwork, making you wonder why it was on the turn-table in the first place. Looking barely any different externally to a standard Territory Turbo, it is certainly not the sort of thing that would have had me coming from the other side of the room to check it out! Well, not unless I knew what it was in the first place! The Cobra on the other hand - which would have had the punters coming in from miles around, was neatly hidden away in behind...but it didn't stop the fans who surrounded it all day with constant photos and looking inside and out. But to top Ford's poor efforts off, Ford had NO printed brochures on offer on any of it's products - matching it's latest penny pinching policy that has also seen the Ford Employee Christmas party cancelled (uncle Scrooge would have been proud!) Fortunately FPV did have plenty of brochures to give away although I was told by one representative that even these were on the endangered list for future shows. Showing how far Ford had cut things back, even Mitsubishi's stand was HUGE in comparison to Ford's, with a second story and some beautifully clad models (of the female kind that is) to add glamour to the great display of it's vehicles which included the newly released EVO. Mitsubishi - unlike Ford - also seemed to understand that a great many of it's product would end up with aftermarket accessories attached to it - and so had a couple of great looking examples all kitted up including one particularly luscious EVO as well as a Triton with all the bling bling... Chrysler also recognised this trend by having Alpine's new 300C showcar for all to see shaming Ford's decision to give up on the Fairlane before it had even begun (Ford didn't even bother adding it's Fairlane Galaxy 540 show car to the Motorshow stage back in 2004). But by far the stand that shamed Ford the most was the Holden stand with it's well thought out array of new Commodores & Statesmans set loud and proud on the front row of it's huge display space...placing it's four cylinder offerings where they ought to be - right at the back... And guess what? Unlike Ford, GM used every bright and attractive colour available and the effect really worked. After
the disappointment of the Sydney Motor Show, we were left to ask: has Ford given
up on the Falcon & Australia? - At a time when you would think you'd need to be
throwing everything at it, Ford's response was downright mute. With Ford's
shrinkage in this country, one has got to wonder whether Ford has a future in
Australia at all - as none of their spending decisions on show in Sydney seemed
to indicate a company intending to manufacture here for the long haul!
|      |
