VE Commodore to benefit next Falcon

FORD Australia executives have revealed that the next-generation Falcon, due in March 2008, will be benchmarked against Holden’s forthcoming VE Commodore and that engineering "on tooling" work for the large sedan will not be locked in until this Christmas.

Codenamed Orion, the next Falcon’s fundamental design and chassis "hard points" are already locked in, but Ford executives have confirmed the longer gap between model releases will allow the next Falcon’s chassis, features and specifications to be further developed in response to Holden’s new Commodore (as well as Mitsubishi’s nine-month-old 380 and Toyota’s all-new Aurion sedan due in November), if required.

"The basic design was locked in two years out (from the next Falcon’s release), but the cars won’t be off-tooling until 15 months out," a Ford source told GoAuto.

"That gives us the luxury of a sizeable window to benchmark our product against theirs."

The Blue Oval therefore appears to have until the end of this year to ensure its next-generation Falcon is competitive with The General’s keenly anticipated VE Commodore, which Holden confirmed last week will be Australia’s first locally-built model range to come standard with ESP stability control.

Ford is keen to avoid the situation that saw the fall from grace of its redesigned $750 million AU Falcon, which did not benefit from the luxury of extensive benchmarking against Holden’s new-for-1997 VT Commodore when it was released a year later in September 1998.

The result was and far more expensive and extensive midlife makeover than planned, resulting in the $500 million BA Falcon facelift revealed in September 2002.

This time round, when launched in March 2008 the new Orion Falcon will be the product of extensive testing against Holden’s new VE, which will have been on the market for almost 20 months.

Before then, however, Ford Australia has confirmed it will upgrade its volume-selling model to better combat Holden’s all-new VE Commodore, due on sale in August, via changes that should constitute a Series II update for the BF Falcon around October this year.

"We do have a few tricks up our sleeve for Falcon later this year, which in time will become more apparent," said Ford Australia president Tom Gorman at last week’s Territory Turbo launch.

Ford is believed to be working on a number of fuel consumption reduction strategies as part of the final upgrade to the current Falcon before it’s replaced. One possibility is the fitment, as standard across the range, of the ZF-supplied six-speed automatic transmission that helped realise fuel economy gains of up to 11 per cent on some Falcon variants in the BF model released last October.