Yesterday Ford took the wraps off the new FG Falcon.

New Australian developed and built cars come along only very rarely; Ford took the unusual step of releasing the car on a Sunday so that it could gain precious free airtime on the Sunday night TV news and in the Monday papers.

Away from my home base, I watched the Sunday night Channel Nine TV news in Adelaide with interest. How breathlessly and non-critically would they report the release of the new car?

The report was relatively short but it was what followed that had me gobsmacked.

Immediately after the report on the Falcon finished, the Nine news moved straight to a segment on the booming sales of the hybrid Toyota Prius, and the way in which some individuals are now converting their cars to battery electric power. The station interviewed several Sydney electric car enthusiasts and presented a glowing report on the cars. Phrases like ‘fuel economy’, ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ ‘oil consumption’ and ‘cost to run’ sprinkled the report.

The juxtaposition couldn’t have been a bigger slap in the face for Ford: even the dimmest viewer could not have missed the implicit comparison.

Today, on the Monday after the Falcon’s release, my emailed News.com.au update doesn’t have a single mention of the new Falcon.

Imagine how different the news reports would have been if Ford had released a car with breakthrough fuel economy and lower greenhouse gas emissions. A turbo diesel engine, or a downsized six cylinder turbocharged to gain efficiency.

Instead we have launch control - and even more power, torque and weight. Oh yes, and a fuel consumption improvement that is nominal to say the least.

It’s very hard to believe that the Falcon will not go the way of the Mitsubishi 380 – and for much the same reasons. High quality engineering directed in completely the wrong direction, aiming at a target that started to move a decade ago and has now gone…

(See also this blog)

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So Mitsubishi’s Adelaide car manufacturing plant is to close. The Mitsubishi 380, the large sedan released in 2005, has proved to be a flop.

Now, and over the next few months, there will be a prolonged post mortem, analysing the reasons why the car failed. Already, I’ve seen statements excusing Mitsubishi Motors Australia from culpability for its failure.

But to anyone not wearing rose-coloured glasses, manufacturing by Mitsubishi in Adelaide has been doomed since the very day of the 380’s release. The company – perhaps driven by their masters in Japan – made the atrocious decision to build and release a car that had no market.

And this is not a retrospective, wise after the event, summary.

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Right now - and probably for the next few years - there’s a helluva bargain to be had.

I’ve bought one to put on the shelf and I highly recommend that anyone else into useable road performance does so too. And what should you buy? At least one of all those BA and BF Ford Falcon XR6 intercoolers that are being flogged-off on Australian eBay, commonly priced from about fifty bucks.

Yes, from fifty bucks.

Now maybe the people who want far in excess of the Falcon’s standard 240kW have an urgent need to replace these Garret-cored, bar-and-plate intercoolers with something far better, but for people who are happy to drive a car with performance not limited by wheelspin, these intercoolers look perfect. Being an all-welded design, they’d also be dead-easy to jacket with aluminium sheet, making them water/air intercooler cores. At a core size of 370 x 175 x 60mm, they’re relatively compact but have well-shaped alloy end tanks. For people wondering overall size, they’re 620 x 270 X 60 cm to the extremities. Inlet/outlet tube size is 58mm (hose ID).

Even if you consider the time and labour to fold up new end tanks from sheet aluminium and pay someone to TIG them to the original core, you’re still talking an excellent intercooler for the price.

The one I bought came with all its hoses and clamps – also very useful when you’re plumbing any intercooler into place.

Without having done any flow or temperature testing, but looking at the core and assessing the original application, I’d be happy running at least 200kW through them – more, eg 250kW – with a good water spray.

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The week that I am writing this we have two press cars. It’s unusual to have two new cars simultaneously; in fact, it’s something I normally strive to avoid unless I am interstate for a period. Then it’s OK because those cars are usually not able to be obtained in my home state – so better to work harder for a short time in order to sample more.

One of the cars is a Mitsubishi 380 VRX 5-speed manual and the other is an automatic 5-speed Holden Epica 2.5.

Both are front-wheel drive but the 380 has 175kW and 343Nm in a body that weighs 1590kg, and the Epica has 115kW and 237Nm and weighs 1500kg.

Clearly, then, the VRX is going to be the faster of the two cars, not only because of its higher flywheel figures outweigh the slightly greater mass but also because its manual transmission has less losses than the Epica’s auto trans.

But is the VRX faster? Not a test in the world is going to show the Epica as being faster than the VRX (or the equivalent in other comparative cars) and yet as is so often the case, the power, torque and mass figures tell a story that is massively incomplete…

It so happened that my wife and I ended up in driving the two cars at the same time. I was in the Epica, she in the VRX – and in front of us a red traffic light. Both in pole position - and when the light turned green, we went for it.

Trouble is, the Epica was ahead all the way to 80 km/h…

Next red light, Georgina got a better launch – but she still took until 60 km /h to get past the Epica.

Simply, the power and torque of the 380 was so great that the traction control kept shutting down the engine as wheelspin occurred.

The same story could be repeated with lots of different cars – those with auto transmissions and insufficient power to break traction (or, to put it another way, a lower torque curve that extends further up the rev range) can be very quick off the line in real world conditions. On the other hand, manual trans cars with bulk off-the-line torque can be relatively slow.

I remember the disbelief when former colleague Michael Knowling wrote of an STi WRX that a Corolla was quicker away from traffic lights; an absolutely true story symptomatic of the STi being the opposite case to the VRX – no bottom-end torque at all…

No matter what figures might show, for real-world quick getaways, very little beats an auto trans matched to an engine that won’t spin the driving wheels.

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Most of our Australian readers won’t be old enough to remember the release of the 1978 VB Commodore – and to be honest, at the time I wasn’t taking much notice of cars myself. However, it was common contemporary lore that the VB represented the new, small and modern family Holden while Ford, with the XD Falcon, persisted with the larger, outmoded type of traditional family car.

With the increasing price of fuel, it appeared that Holden was onto a winner with the Commodore.

But in fact they weren’t onto a winner at all: the VN model of a decade later went to a larger – especially wider – body, initially perched on the narrow track of the previous series.

Most pundits would have thought – and in fact did think – that Holden was heading in the right direction with their smaller original Commodore. It seemed the correct car for the times and in comparison, the face-lifted XC that became the XD looked like a big mistake. (In fact, a few years after this, I can remember looking at an open XD wagon and wondering who on earth needed a load area so enormous.)

But new car buyers didn’t agree with the smaller VB-VL Commodore strategy – Holden would have sold more Commodores if they’d stuck with the larger body all the way through.

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Today I returned Honda’s Type R Civic to the Queensland office. I am quite happy to see it go: I think the Civic Type R is a pretty weak car – something I make clear in our road test that will appear in AutoSpeed in due course.

With a 2 litre naturally aspirated engine that revs to 8000 rpm and develops 148kW, it might look the goods on paper - but the reality is very different.

To go further, I think the idea that small, naturally aspirated engines can compete with turbo cars is the stuff of fairytales.

The Peugeot 206 GTi 180  and Ford Focus ST170 were similar cars in concept to the Type R Honda – all based around the idea that naturally aspirated, high revving engines have some intrinsic advantage over their forced induction competitors. That’s a purported advantage over turbo competitors that have more peak power – and vastly more average power through the rev range.

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