Understandable.
Petrol prices are biting, and while the Falcon gets good economy for it's size, "small cars" aren't "small" anymore. While we were getting a towbar fitted to our G6E, they loaned us a Mondeo diesel automatic. You know, to be brutally honest, it was great...plenty of interior room, it went like a cut snake, and actually handled really well. A friend of mine has a Mondeo XR5 turbo and it has plenty of luxury stuff and toys to play with.
You know, if we had driven a Mondeo first, we might well have bought one instead of the Falcon.
Gone are the days of smaller cars being hopeless, underpowered, boring, featureless, shoddily-made crapbuckets. they're perfectly acceptable alternatives to the slightly bigger cars from the same maker, and that presents a problem for, in this case, Ford.
You can see it at dealerships...positively savage price cutting to shift Falcons off the showroom floor, up-speccing cars and offering options for free, all sorts of deals to move stock.
I don't see this ending well...the Mistubishi 380 was a damn good car, nothing wrong with it, but it went the way of the Dodo because of market forces. The overseas head honchos have had their eyes on local Holden and Ford markets and sales figures for decades now, and sooner or later they're going to place an ultimatum on the table and tell us what they want us to do here in Australia.
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