End of Altona: Straw that broke Toyota’s back

Staff leave on the last day of car manufacturing at Toyota's Altona plant. Picture: Supplied.

It’s a story from the annals of most carmakers, but not Toyota. Toyota doesn’t close factories, Toyota keeps going. The shutting of Altona, built to make the Camry two decades ago, is an event unique in the Toyota world.

It’s all the more resonant because Australia was a key step in Toyota’s emergence onto the global stage. The first country to build Toyotas outside Japan. The first to make engines. The first to make a car for export.

That was the Camry and the place was Altona. Toyota exits as our most successful vehicle exporter, having sent 1.3 million cars overseas. The last car, which rolled off today, takes the total number of Toyotas made here over five decades to 3,451,115. Most were Camrys.

Toyota backed the Camry project because the connection to Australia runs deep. The never-say-die corporate ethos is engineered into every vehicle and that’s something every Australian knows. It was one of the first things I learned arriving here in the mid-80s: the ancient Corolla I was driving would never let me down. Go bush, and it’s all Landcruisers and Hiluxes. Nothing else can cut it in such an unforgiving land.

Reliability across a range of cars and an extensive dealer network propelled Toyota to market leadership in the 1990s and eventually to domination. During the noughties, one in five new vehicles wore the badge. That’s slipped a little since, but Toyota remains untouchable.

That won’t change when the new Japanese-made Camry reaches showrooms in November. The Camry, despite its export success, never forged the same emotional link with Australians as other Toyotas. Most poignantly, Toyota’s large car could never loosen the stranglehold on our psyche of the Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon.

Toyota says Altona didn’t add up once Ford and Holden decided to quit. It had no choice but to leave. Given its record, that’s not difficult to believe.

So it’s deeply ironic that the demise of Commodore and Falcon was the straw that broke the Camry’s back.