Best Aussie car of last 30 years

[Bossxr8]

Originally Posted by DJM83

Unpopular opinion.
I think the Phase 3 has been dethroned numerous times.

Not if you look at it from the time frame it was new. It was so far in front of it's rivals it will never be dethroned. Sure other cars came later and were quicker, but no 1 vehicle simply reached a pinnacle like the Ph3 did. Used values prove it too. Long live the king.

Originally Posted by whynot

After praising Ford for the development of the Territory, I should also be a realist about what happened in the following years.

Ford dropped the ball. The most glaring mistakes was;

A) working on getting the turbo into the Territory when they should have released the diesel with the SY.

B) not releasing a revised front end to fix the ball joint issue, much, much sooner.

From memory, the plan was for the Territory to replace the Falcon Wagon. However, the Territory was gulping way too much fuel in city traffic for the fleets to swap across from the wagon. There was also ample warning from the various government fleets that the Territory had excluded itself from selection, purely on its fuel consumption.

As an aside, I would regularly see 18-20l/100km out of my Territory, as it was stuck in the peak hour crawl down Gympie Rd during works for the Clem 7 tunnel. The fleet manager hated me as he was being measured on average fuel consumption, and the Territory stood out in bold on his naughty list.

Fitting the diesel would have corrected this problem. And Ford lost a lot of sales because of the misplaced effort in the Turbo Territory.

I can only assume that the development of the FG Falcon in the period 2005 to 2008 simply saturated what little development capability FoA had left.

It would have been very interesting if Ford went the Prado route with the Territory. Lifted the ride height, converted the rear back to a solid axle (maybe even leaf sprints), installed manual hubs on the front, and given the Territory a low range automatic gearbox. But, that is not to be.

Ford had 3 options to choose from at the time, with 1 of them to go into production. They ran case studies on all of them.

The choices were...

Territory turbo.
Territory diesel.
Territory LTD. With the aim to try to move into the luxury SUV market vs X5 and Merc ML.


Obviously the TT won out. Cost was probably a factor as it would have been the easiest to do.

Also LPG compatible Territory was a goer, the engines even started running down the line for weeks before legal considerations killed it. The standard Territory engine picked up the hardened valve seats and LPG rods as standard. So it was fitted with the LPG engine, but with petrol fuel system. There are probably hundreds of Territory's running around there with the owners unaware they have the stronger rod "green top" engine powering it.

Originally Posted by willo56

If sales were a factor then the EF-EL falcon would be in the running

Might be wrong but I think this was the last time the Falcon outsold the commo

EF was the last time Falcon finished no 1 for a calendar year. BA outsold VY on a number of occasions, but not for a whole year.