Some very interesting and revealing prices. What I have noticed lately is a huge change in the Automotive industry, ranging from Citroens, Alfa Romeo, Peugeot, Jeep, Fiat and others leaving the shores of Australia. The withdrawal of all Ford small 'ish cars like Fiesta, Focus, Puma from the Australian market, the cost of Automotive Accessories and Spare parts, all Oil products, Jaguar going purely Electric only, and the assault on the market by Chinese Electrics. Even companies like Honda and Toyota are starting to struggle, the quality of some Lexus models is beginning to be questioned.......it is a maelstrom of uncertainty that is permeating the many facets of Australian life. An eye opener. Regards Styria
N.B. I should also include the political and economic upheavals in a number of European countries, the collapse of Spain, reverberations of a number of issues in Nordic countries......one could go on.
BTW Bryce, thank you for publishing the Auction results.
None of the marques you mentioned produce dual cab tonka trucks that 18yo apprentices on red P plates can jack up to monster truck proportions with cheap Chinese faux beadlock wheels and 40" "muddies" that stick 2" out the guards and "protect" with 38mm cold rolled steel tube wraparound bullbars to mount their 11 million candle power LED spotlights with which to highbeam everyone who dares drive less than 40km/h above the posted speed limit in the right lane.
Australia is moving/has moved rapidly toward an Americas-like bifurcation of society where most of the population is presented with - and more importantly accepts - a binary forced-choice socio-political identity. In automotive terms: if you're left you buy a chinese-made EV, because notable caveats like tyres aside a battery car is either made just as well by a Chinese company as in china by a non-chinese company, or cheaper for the same features as a Korean or Japanese competitor, and avoiding Chinese cars for political reasons smacks of racism and right wing ideology. If you're right you buy an American pickup truck or SUV (and don't think about whether it's actually made in Thailand (ford etc) or Canada (ram)) because "what's so bad about Trump anyway?"* and festoon it with as much "I shoot and I vote"-type accoutrement as you can afford/feel the need to peacock to your friends in the manosphere with.
Most European brands have been far too slow to adapt to this new version of car-as-extension-of-dog-ownership. The irony as I see it is that Ford Australia and Holden have been milking the "red team/blue team" identity politics more broadly and successfully than most other markets for decades, so this tribalism is not at all new in Australia, it has just been scaled up to the level of countries or even whole regions now, with the decidedly non-communist ROK lumped in with the arguably-also-not-really-communist PRC on one end of the derby, and the "AR15 full of Freedom" crowd on the other^. Europe is too nuanced, conflicted and ultimately expensive** to compete in this Mexican wrestling match for cartoon characters.
*actual quote from my weekend, at the funeral of an old die hard hippie, spoken by a 30-something lady who clearly doesn't mind a bit of unrequested highly leveraged property market manipulation in her reproductive medicine.
^of course there is still middle ground to be had. BYD and KIA make dual cab utes too if one wants to feign tolerance of both sects.
**I believe a moderately optioned Ford Ranger now costs a touch less than a BMW M3, but only until you hang enough ARB and Kings fruit off the front and top of the Ranger to ensure the M3's total annihilation. The M3, however, would require extensive modification to survive even the mildest of road rage rampages with enough left to repeatedly ram any victims with dashcams, hence the unfavourable value proposition.
