I do find it interesting reading people's thoughts on cars.....especially when they are so very different to what might be considered the norm in their market.
Australia was a little different compared to the US and Europe post WW2. The US wasn't in tatters like Europe or broke like the UK, but we certainly were a little bruised.
Europe needed cars that were small and economical - resources were both scarce and expensive as was fuel....rationed! The UK didn't stop rationing completely until the early 1950s.
Cars were also luxury items rather than almost part of the every day compared to the US. Small was still expensive and most manufacturers were very nationalistic - Italian cars for Italian people, French for French etc.
Australia, started to take large numbers of skilled economic migrants from Europe in the late 1940s - surveyors, engineers etc. We were about to embark on the biggest civil engineering feats our country had seen - the Snowy Mountains Scheme.....
Australia's automotive industry was dominated by the British, American designed and often Canadian built Fords and the newly announced Holden from GM...all 2.2 liters of it. The French in particular, have sold in Australia since WW1....French roads and Australian roads were rather similar - poor, which tended to make their cars suitable.
However, Australia also had import tariffs which were variable dependent on how much of a far was sourced locally...assemble locally and source your parts here and your cars were cheaper than if they were fully imported....
So they did.
BMC, Ford, Renault, Triumph, Vauxhall (Holden), VW, Chrysler, Citroën, Toyota, Datsun and Peugeot all either fully manufactured or assembled in Australia...making their cars more affordable. So the cars that many of you may consider as 'funny small foreign cars', were common place here as a result of them manufacturing locally. Renault even won our first 'Car of the Year' poll in the early 1960's...
