Top 10 Australian cars of all time
Meet the greatest motors of the antipodes
The death of the Australian motor industry has been widely proclaimed, what with the closure of Toyota’s Altona plant in 2017, hot on the heels of announcements from both Ford and GM that manufacture and assembly Down Under was to cease.
The remote continent was never exactly an international powerhouse of motor manufacture, yet its love affair with the car is second to none: at its 1970s peak it was churning out close to 500,000 vehicles a year, making it the world’s 10th-biggest car producer.
Whether homegrown, built on-site by a global firm, or sent as CKD kits, Australian cars were often infused with a good dose of local personality. Throw in some native small-volume producers and men-in-sheds dreamers and, for a country of 23 million people Australia has an impressive motoring legacy.
Closing a factory, the Toyota way Sorry, but your browser needs Javascript to use this site. If you re not sure how to activate it, please refer to this site: https://www.enable-javascript.com/
Workers at Toyota Motor Corp. s Altona plant on the outskirts of Melbourne attend a ceremony to mark the closing of the factory in October 2017. | CHUNICHI SHIMBUN
Chunichi Shimbun Feb 12, 2021
Executives at Toyota Motor Corp. and one of its subsidiaries were watching on a big screen video footage of factory workers, in tears and with smiles, sending off the last vehicle manufactured at a plant that was closing.