Ford shuns crew-cab bandwagon

FORD Australia is sceptical about the viability of Holden’s forthcoming crew-cab utility called the Crewman. But Ford has plans it could re-ativate if it is proved wrong.

The Crewman, based on the Holden cab-chassis one-tonner, goes on sale at the end of the third quarter. A four-wheel drive version will follow in early 2004, followed by an HSV version called Avalanche.

The Crewman and Avalanche have been previewed by the Cross8 concept, which was first shown at the Melbourne motor show in 2002.

Ford actually beat Holden to the concept crew-cab stage with its R5. That debuted as a two-wheel drive at the Sydney motor show in 2000 and re-appeared as a jacked-up four-wheel drive at Melbourne in 2001.

But Ford judged a production version of R5 would cannabalise sales of existing Falcon utes and the imported Courier.

Ford Australia president Geoff Polites believes the Crewman could have some impact on the Commodore ute, but more particularly the imported Rodeo.

“I suspect the biggest impact the (Holden) crew-cab will have will be on the Rodeo,” he said.

“It will have some impact on total ute volumes, but the biggest impact it will have will be on existing four-door crew-cab utes, because that’s a specific market.”Mr Polites’ theory is born out of Ford’s crew-cab experience, which ended up being too marginal as a business case to justify giving the green light.

The massive commitment to developing the Territory cross-over wagon at the same time also worked against the vehicle.

“We did some work on a crew-cab in terms of a computer styling exercise and some costs about three years ago and we looked at it and stared at it and got all emotional about it, but we didn’t have the resources to do it, so we just filed it away,” said Mr Polites.

The R5 concept car was produced as a result of that investigation.

Ford estimated it could sell around 4000 of the Falcon-based crew-cab utilities per year, but crucially deduced that 50 per cent were substitutional sales for the traditional two-wheel drive Falcon utlity.

“It all depends on the substitution equation,” said Mr Polites.

“If you were to build the R5 tomorrow and 50 per cent of the sales come out of existing Falcon utes, it is a lot of money. You have spent $30 or $40 million to sell 2000 vehicles incrementally, and you don’t get your money back on those sorts of equations.”But Mr Polites said the crew-cab concept was revisited during the Territory development, including a computer styling image of what it would look like.

He estimated it would take two years for a locally-built crew cab to go from green light to production reality, if Ford did decided to do one.

“You’ve got to do a full engineering validation, so it’s not like it’s a Falcon ute. You’ve got a whole new body structure that you’ve got to do durability testing on,” he said.

“So there is a tooling job and a durability testing job, and you wouldn’t want to do it unless you did it properly. So from program approval to launch is probably two years, or a bit more.”Holden boss Peter Hanenberger said the Crewman would succeed because it was pitched at a “totally different market sector” to Rodeo or the traditional utility.

“People don’t understand market segments how we tailor our classic ute, our Rodeo, our chassis-cab and our Crewman,” he said.

“They are four totally different market segments and the nice thing is no-one has the Crewman market segment and … the business case, our forecast, is for huge plus growth.”* Meanwhile, Ford has issued the first action photograph of the Territory SUV it will release in mid-2004. Shot at Fraser Island, the picture (above) shows Territory in full flight for the first time.

It is believed the photo was released last week in a move aimed to steal thunder from Holden, which issued photos of its new Commodore wagon-based AWD named Adventra on Monday.

According to Ford, the first off-tool Territory prototypes rolled off Ford's Broadmeadows production line earlier this year and have undergone extensive testing at Ford's You Yangs proving ground, on frozen lakes of Sweden, in the West Australian Pilbara region, on urban roads around Sydney and Melbourne, and along the beaches of Fraser Island.

Ford says the confirmation prototypes will go on to complete more than two million kilometres of testing before Territory goes into production.

Ford engineers have already completed more than 3200 system verification tests, in addition to about 9000 component tests and more than 20 million virtual kilometres in Ford's supercomputers.

* In other Ford news, the Blue Oval has announced the high-riding Falcon utility variant it unveiled at this year’s Melbourne motor show, where it was dubbed the Hi-Ride, will be called RTV – an acronym for Rugged Terrain Vehicle.

Apparently RTV was chosen from thousands of entries received by Ford as part of the 'Win a Truckload of Tools' competition earlier this year, in which Ford invited people to name the new vehicle.

Mt Eliza resident Maurice Clarke came up with the RTV name, earning himself $10,000 worth of DeWalt power tools.

RTV, which will be launched later this year, features power windows, CD player, one-tonne payload capacity, the choice of six-cylinder or V8 power, differential locking system and a unique suspension kit with 80mm higher ride height and 50mm wider wheel tracks.

The Ford RTV is likely to go on sale in October priced around $30,000.