"Falcon is dead" drive.com

[bathurst77]

http://www.smh.com.au/drive/motor-ne...0120-mkfq.html

Another nail appears to have been hammered into the rear-wheel-drive Falcon's coffin, with a Ford insider reportedly telling a respected US car magazine that the car "is dead".

Motor Trend quotes the Ford source in a story on the next-generation Mustang that's due in 2014 and rumoured by some media to be linked to the next-generation Falcon expected the same year.

The story follows Ford boss Alan Mulally's comments last week that the car maker would no longer produce different vehicles for different countries, confirming the next Falcon would have to share its large-car platform with the next-generation North American Taurus.

The Taurus is currently front- and all-wheel-drive only, and Ford told Drive at last week's Detroit motor show that its rear-wheel-drive development program remains frozen after it was suspended in late 2008 due to increasingly strict emissions limits in the US.

Motor Trend's source says the new Mustang will remain rear-wheel-drive, though it looks set to be built on its own compact platform and sold around the world rather than extended to cater for large-car applications such as the Falcon or Taurus.

In a discussion about Ford's global rear-wheel-drive large-car platform, the Ford insider told Motor Trend, "The [next-generation rear-drive] Falcon is dead."

In Fairfax's story last week about the demise of the Australian Falcon, Ford boss Mulally hinted on the eve of the 2010 Detroit motor show that the Mustang may be the only rear-wheel-drive Ford available in Australia in the future.

"You can imagine another new platform, just like the Falcon, that's going to be rear-wheel-drive for [the new] Mustang, so you can imagine driving the One Ford [program] we're going to have every one of those [One Ford vehicles globally], and there's no reason why we can't have it [the Mustang] in Australia."

Neither Ford Australia nor its parent company would guarantee the future of Falcon production in Australia.

In a further twist this week, Ford Australia axed more than 30 contracted employees who Drive believes were working on computer-aided design studies for projects relating to the next-generation Falcon.