MULALLY TO AUSTRALIA: YOU’LL GET THE TAURUS AND LIKE IT

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Ford Motor Company boss Alan Mulally’s penny-pinching obsession with “One Ford” (i.e. ending home market models and selling only “global” platforms) has broadsided the legendary RWD Australian Ford Falcon at Detroit’s 2010 International Auto Show.

According to Australia’s “Drive” website, Mulally intends to kill off the home-market RWD Falcon and cram some future derivative of the wimpy, V8-less, Volvo-derived FWD Taurus down the throats of Australia’s motorists. The story reports:

Ford's large car is likely to be based on the American-designed and built front-wheel-drive Taurus, which was unsuccessfully imported into Australia in the 1990s

.

As one sagacious commenter on Bangshift.com observed:

Mr. M has that bass-ackward, he needs to bring the Falcon to the states. So there. Bet 1/2 billion Falcon owners back me on that one. Taurus my assus.

Another RWD V8 fan on Bangshift.com blasted back:

Memo to Alan M.:

Sir

Cranial-Rectal Inversion has hit. Remove head and try again. Use supplied crowbar.

Seemingly only Mulally and a room-full of idiotic accountants are enamored with sending the wrong-wheel-drive “Chicago Bull” to the Land Down Under.

The short-sightedness at the heart of this “One Ford” decision is the same sort of “penny-wise, pound-foolish” thinking that saddled what’s probably “the last of the V8s – Ford’s Coyote V8 -- with the same 100mm bore centers and similar spindly powdered metal rods as the “Gen I” modulars.

(Ford’s loyal, GM LS-fighting hot rodders really only wanted three main problems fixed with the DOHC modular: (1) displacement-limiting narrow bore centers, (2) glass-jawed hypereutectic pistons, (3) spindly cracked cap rods. And Ford’s Coyote V8 apparently fails to deliver any of these. 5.0 Mustang & Super Fords reports that the Coyote’s flimsy stock internals (save the forged crank) WILL NOT WITHSTAND SUPERCHARGING IN STOCK FORM!

Ford has apparently learned little in the past twenty years about how their customers tend to modify their Mustangs or what made the original 5.0 such a phenomenon.

But it’s at least better than the “buzzin’ half-dozen” V6s that are mandatory in Ford’s large FWD/AWD vehicles.)

The ever coy Mulally reportedly told the press that the decision to make the next global large car FWD, AWD or RWD doesn’t have to be made until 2011. But it should already be obvious that a fairly important group of Ford’s customer base still wants RWD and optional V8s.

Perhaps to pacify the critics, Mulally blew a little “imaginary” smoke the way of the RWD advocates:

"We also have some really good RWDs, like the Mustang. You can imagine another new platform, just like the Falcon, that's going to be RWD for Mustang, so you can imagine driving the One Ford we're going to have every one of those, and so there's no reason why we can't have it in Australia."

What we really imagine, Alan, is that “One Ford” is going to combine with CO2 and Corporate Average Fuel Economy jitters, myopic beancounting, and bureaucratic “appliance motoring” sensibilities to justify the “business case” for killing V8s and RWD. And that would be a mistake of Roger Smithian proportions.