Signature Luxury Travel & Style
DREAM MACHINES
American-style cars are trending once more in Australia
The most celebrated sports car in America is not Ferrari or Lamborghini, but the homegrown Chevrolet Corvette. The pure twoseater, with a history dating to 1953, has just entered its eighth generation with an all-new C8 model that moves its engine from the front, to a more supercar-like location behind the cockpit.
That’s not all that’s groundbreaking about the new Corvette. It’s also the first ever to be factorybuilt in right-hand drive… and it’s coming to
Australia next year.
The Corvette will be joining a mini-stampede of Ameri-car-na that began four years ago with Ford Australia’s official importation of the Mustang. It was followed last year by the Chevrolet Camaro, General Motors’ answer to Ford’s famous, affordable sportster.
Indeed, Mustang versus Camaro has been one of America’s great automotive rivalries since the early-1960s – but it has never officially played out Down Under. You might wonder what took them all so long.
Our renewed interest in American cars is all to do with the end of full-scale car manufacturing in Australia back in 2017. Having to revert to importing cars, Ford and Holden have vigorously turned their attentions to their US parents’ product catalogues.
Holden was at the heart of Australian motoring for more than a century – firstly supplying bodies for imported chassis, then as our first complete car-maker from 1948. Hence the emotion when, in February of this year, the GM announced that it would lay the Holden brand to rest.
The Corvette is intended to be one of a handful of ‘speciality’ GM models to be imported by former Holden performance partner HSV and, where necessary, converted locally to right-hand drive.
Australia has had a trickle of other American cars all along, of course.
Jeep’s utilitarian Wrangler model (from $48,950) has clear roots in the military-bred models sold here since 1960. In recent years, it’s been supplanted by a range of large family SUVs and smaller, urban-SUV models.
Chrysler muscled in on Australia’s performance-sedan action 15 years ago with the big, affordable 300C and sporty 300 SRT ($59,950-$74,950). Conveniently, it was already built in right-hand drive for other markets.
Enter the Ford Mustang, in 2016. While the twodoor coupe and convertible Mustang was not really a replacement for the Australian four-door Falcon, it still galloped to almost 10,000 sales in its first full year here (2017) and remains Ford Australia’s third biggestselling model.
And why not? Mustang’s ’60s-cool styling is an automotive icon; in January, Steve McQueen’s famous Mustang GT from the 1968 movie Bullitt sold for
US$3.7 million. Get McQueen cool for a fraction of that coin, with Mustang’s four-cylinder turbocharged ‘Fastback’ coupe and convertible priced from $51,490-$60,790 and 5.0-litre V8 GT from $64,190-$75,390.
There’s even a Bullitt tribute version ($73,688), mimicking the 1968 car’s special wheels and Highland Green paint job. And brand new is a no-holds-barred, supercharged V8 Mustang R-SPEC ($100,480).
It, too, has a historic reason for existing: a supercharged Camaro to topple.
HSV has played its Camaro hand very differently. Equipped with larger and more powerful V8 and supercharged V8 engines than the Mustang, Camaro has carried a premium price ($86,990-$159,990) and is available in closed-coupe form only.
HSV is also conspicuous in another American trend: that of the giant pick-up truck. HSV imports the Chevy Silverado ($114,990-147,990), which, at up to 6.1 metres long and around two metres tall, towers over most utes.
The Silverado is butting up against Chrysler’s Ram V8 1500 Laramie ($99,500) and turbo-diesel 2500 ($109,950) among those buyers who tow big boats, big caravans, or who just like their stuff… big.
Still, proving that it’s as silly to stereotype our American friends as it is anyone else, there’s a US automotive brand that has probably done more than any other to redefine our motoring vision and set its course for the future: the all-electric Tesla.
Tesla’s Model S (from $141,811) is a luxury executive and family sedan deserving comparison with Europe’s best; the Model X (from $157,418 ‘Long Range’ version and from $176.918 ‘Performance’ version) is a large
SUV with its gimmicky but effective ‘gullwing’ doors; Model Y, due this year or next, is a compact SUV; and the Model 3 (from $75,425) is the compact sedan that is really accelerating electrification through the mainstream car market.
Speaking of accelerating: electric rather than internalcombustion propulsion, combined with Tesla’s touted ‘Ludicrous mode’ setting, empowers the plush five-seater Model S sedan to sprint from standstill to 100 kilometres per hour in a staggering 2.6 seconds.
That makes the Tesla sedan at least one second faster than any big, burly, boisterous V8 supercharged Mustang or Camaro. Faster even than the latest and best-ever Corvette. And there’s no rockets’ red glare, or bombs bursting in air: the Tesla is a near-silent assassin, and it’s as American as apple pie.