Five awful Aussie-built cars
Monday, 13 April 2020
While it is natural to look back on the Australian car industry with rose-tinted glasses and remember the great cars, it pays to remember that the Aussies produced their fair share of utter howlers too (some would even say more than their fair share).
So today we look at five of the biggest dogs to roll down the Aussie assembly lines. And there's way more than just five (in fact, it was actually quite hard to choose just five), so please share your picks in the comments!
Holden Camira
The Camira had its 15 minutes of fame in legendary Australian film The Castle (Could you move the Camira? I need to get the Torana out so I can get to the Commodore) and, frankly, that is about 14 and a half more minutes than it deserved.
**READ MORE:
* Holden highlights in New Zealand: part 1
* Classic Ford Capris now sell for Ferrari money
* Car 101: The big deal about Bathurst
* Five cars you probably didn't know Hyundai built**
The Camira got off to a bad start in life by being built on GM's abysmal J-body global platform (which literally no good cars were built on), but was also wildly underpowered and terribly built - bits regularly fell off and they started rusting before the factory warranty ran out.
General Motors NZ even gave up on the Aussie Camira after the first generation and replaced it with a rebadged Isuzu, although the wagon was still the Australian-built car.
Holden Commodore Four
Prior to the Camira, Holden had developed a bad habit of jamming awful, underpowered four-cylinder engines in its cars, which saw the birth of the Sunbird (from the Torana) and, of course, the much-reviled four-cylinder Commodore.
The 1.9-litre Starfire four-cylinder engine debuted in the Sunbird and continued in the VC Commodore after the Sunbird was dropped. Essentially Holden's 2.85-litre straight six-cyinder engine with two cylinders lopped off, it produced 58kW of power and pushed the Commodore to 100km/h in a staggeringly slow 17.5 seconds, which was embarrassing even back in 1980…
To add insult to injury, the Starfire had to work so hard in the Commodore that it used the same, if not more, fuel as the six.
Ford Cortina Six
A uniquely Australian idea, the Cortina Six was a stain on the range, mainly across the Mark III and IV Cortina (the Mark V was sold for a few years in Australia, but was dropped after slow sales).
Replacing the English 1.6 and 2.0-litre fours with the 3.3-litre and hefty 4.1-litre straight sixes from the Falcon might have sounded like a good idea on paper, but in reality it was a thirsty, tragically nose-heavy lump that was universally derided for its awful handling.
It is said that it was so bad that it was proof that it was actually possible for a car to both understeer and oversteer at the same time.
Morris/Leyland Marina 2600
Sharing the 2.6-litre inline-six from the entry Leyland P76 this ultimate Marina could rocket to 100km/h from a standing start in under 9 seconds. It wasn't a pleasant experience, however, because if the Cortina Six was bad at handling, the Marina 2600 was even worse.
Legendary Aussie motoring journalist Bill Tuckey once wrote in Wheels magazine that it was the only car he'd ever driven which could display understeer and oversteer simultaneously. In a straight line.
The six-cylinder Marina offered a three-speed manual transmission which was actually a four-speed transmission with first blanked off. The reasoning behind this was that the engine had so much torque that first wasn't necessary. Which says a lot about management decisions at the time…
Ford Capri
Developed at the same time as Mazda's fantastic MX-5, Ford Australia's Capri was… somewhat less fantastic.
Reviving the revered Capri name on a Mazda 323/Ford laser-based front-wheel-drive roadster wasn't a very good idea to begin with and the car was plagued with reliability and build quality woes from the outset.
The first Capris off the line quickly developed a reputation for having a very leaky soft top and while Ford quickly fixed it, the reputation stuck with it for the rest of its life.
Although developed in Australia and known locally as an Aussie car, the vast majority of Capris were actually sold in America as the Mercury Capri, with just 10,347 of the total 66,279 cars built being RHD.