How Australia stopped building cars, and what it left behind

On 20 October 2017 the last Holden Commodore came down the line at Elizabeth, in Adelaide's northern suburbs, and a few hundred people stood around and watched it happen. Toyota had closed Altona a fortnight before that. Ford had gone the previous October, at Broadmeadows and Geelong. Mitsubishi had shut Tonsley Park back in 2008, which at the time looked like one company's bad decade rather than the start of anything.

The politics has been chewed over ever since and there is nothing useful left to add to it. The part that gets almost no attention is what it did to the second-hand market, which is where nearly everybody actually encounters these cars.

The category that never got replaced

What Australia built, above all, was the large rear-drive family sedan. The Commodore and the Falcon were built for distances and road surfaces that nobody in Europe or Japan was designing around, and they were sold at a price an ordinary family could actually reach. Two adults, three kids, a boot that swallowed the lot, and 900km of Hume Highway without complaining.

Nothing replaced them. The Commodore badge went onto an imported car for a couple of years and then stopped altogether. Buyers who needed the room went to dual-cab utes and large SUVs instead, which is most of the reason the new-car sales charts look the way they do now. So in the used market the affordable large sedan is a closed set. Every one that will ever exist already exists.

The three lives of a locally built sedan

Almost every one of these still on the market has lived one of three lives. Working out which matters far more than the year on the plate or the number on the odometer.

1. 1.Fleet. Government, mining, hire, taxi. The kilometres look frightening and are usually the gentlest kind, because they were highway kilometres, and the servicing was done on schedule by a system that did not care whether anyone felt like it that month. Ex-taxi LPG Falcons are their own category and want their own inspection.
2. 2.Family. Moderate distance, mixed conditions, and servicing entirely at the mercy of whoever owned it. This is most of them, and the spread of condition inside this group is enormous.
3. 3.Enthusiast. Preserved, or modified, and the two could not be further apart. A preserved one is the best buy on the market. A modified one needs you to find out exactly what was done, by whom, and whether the tune it is running now is the one it was sold with.

The same reading applies on the other side of the closure. The Camry and the Aurion built at Altona went into fleets by the tens of thousands, and the Territory was a genuinely Australian-designed family wagon that Ford never bothered to replace with anything.

What closing a factory did to owning the car

These cars did not become orphans overnight, and parts supply for the ordinary stuff has held up far better than the gloomier predictions in 2017 suggested. Filters, brakes, suspension, exhaust: all fine, all cheap, and likely to stay that way for years, because they were built in numbers that keep a whole aftermarket alive.

Three things did change, and they get worse slowly rather than suddenly.

• Model-specific parts have a finite supply with no new production behind them. Interior trim, a few electronic modules, and the occasional body panel are the ones people struggle with.
• The expertise is thinning out. The workshops that really knew these cars are the ones staffed by people who trained on them, and every year a few more of those retire.
• Nobody issues new fixes any more. A model still in production quietly accumulates revised parts and updated procedures. A discontinued one is frozen with whatever faults it had on the last day of the line.

That last one actually works in your favour, if you use it. The weak points of these cars are now known completely and permanently, in a way they never are for something still being developed. All of it is written down somewhere.

If you are buying one

Buy the car, not the story. The affection people have for these things is real and it prices ordinary examples optimistically, particularly anything with a V8 badge and a recent detail. What decides whether yours turns out well is the same as it has always been: what this exact model and engine is documented to fail at, whether this one is sitting at that mileage, and whether the service history shows the work being done or being put off.

Ten minutes reading before you drive two hours to look at it. Not after.