[Road_Warrior]

Originally Posted by FPV GTHO

I wasn't really with you on this previously, but the recent Taurus announcement makes it a bit more plausible.

However, there's still going to be a question of costs somewhere. Either Falcon stays and Broadmeadows takes on a Mustang line or gets converted to a CD4 line. History shows that Holden spent $600m on an already developed Cruze and Mitsubishi spent a similar amount on a face lifted Galant. How many hundreds of millions will it cost to adapt Broadmeadows to produce Mustang?

Part of the problem with Holden and the Cruze was that Holden did the development for the hatchback and the fact they were using an ancilliary assembly line that hadnt been used in years (I think this is the old 'Plant No. 2' where the Vectra was built). So the startup costs associated with that would have been huge. As Broady is a solitary assembly line that is in constant use and being regularly updated, you'd have to say that costs for Mustang production would be limited Mustang-specific tooling and alteration of existing tooling and machines to allow Mustang-specific processes to take place. The processes involved for making one unibody car over another are basically the same, just the parameters are different. Sure, there might be some fundamental differences (sedan v ute for example) but they won't have that problem.