The revival of Australia’s manufacturing industry is focused on building the future

Local car production is experiencing a manufacturing revival, with 40,000 still working in the industry.

Stephen Corby

3 min read

3:03PMFebruary 03, 2023.

Updated 12:14PMFebruary 07, 2023

Resurgence of Australia's car industry. Picture: Josie Hayden

Just over five years since major production lines in South Australia and Victoria ground to a halt, local car production is experiencing a manufacturing renaissance, partly driven by a move to electric vehicle technology.

Many of the 40,000 people – a number tallied by a 2014 Productivity Commission inquiry report – who faced job losses during the 2017 closures, which involved the Big Three (Toyota, Holden and Ford), are now part of this industrial reinvention.

Lennie Cucksey was a Holden production engineer by trade but has been a car enthusiast all his life.

He left Holden to join a Queensland-based EV start-up company called Roev.

“Once you’ve been bitten by the bug and been involved in the production of vehicles, it’s really hard to shake it,” he says.

“It’s very, very complicated to explain but it’s kind of like a very beautifully executed dance.

“At the end of it, you just go: ‘Wow, we did that, it wasn’t easy but we did that, and it’s amazing.’”

For a country with tiny scales of production compared to the rest of the world, keeping the industry viable was always a tough task.

But that environment has shaped skills re-emerging at companies like Walkinshaw Engineering in Clayton, Victoria, and Premcar, an engineering-driven company based on the Prodrive model in the UK.

Walkinshaw cleverly read the room as Australia’s ute-buying appetites changed and sales of the Thai-built Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger – now the biggest selling vehicles in the country – went through the roof.

Ford Ranger Raptor Baja

Re-engineering the big Dodge RAM trucks to right-hand drive provided proof of engineering proficiency at Walkinshaw and soon other car makers began knocking on the door.

Walkinshaw built more cars last year – including its core left-to-right-hand drive RAM truck business and its high-performance variant of the VW Amarok ute – than Holden Special Vehicles did in its heyday.

Premcar, which began with offline niche vehicles such as the XR6, XR8 and LPG-powered Falcons under the Ford Performance Vehicles (FPV) banner, now is fettling the hulking Bushmaster for defence supplier Thales and has a raft of ex-Ford engineers and product specialists within its ranks.

When local manufacturing ended, although Premcar lost its biggest client, it quick-stepped into niche automotive work of a different kind.

Engineering director Bernie Quinn says Premcar had to reinvent itself to survive.

“I strongly believe that Australian automotive engineers are among the best in the world, and [are] professional problem-solvers,” he says.

As a result, the demand for experienced Australian engineers, particularly those with automotive experience, is now at a premium.

Toyota’s decision to make Walkinshaw its production centre for the new full-sized Tundra 3.5-litre twin turbo hybrid pick-up late this year caught many industry commentators by surprise, as the Japanese giant is fiercely protective of its brand and rarely, if ever, “outsources”.

Toyota will bring 300 Tundras across from the US this year, together with a team of Japanese and US-based engineers, to allow Walkinshaw to fully refine its left-to-right-hand drive conversions. Details are still secret, but the business case – what the Tundras can be sold for, and the potential size of the market here – clearly makes good business sense, or it simply wouldn’t happen.

The Toyota Tundra truck (overseas model shown)

This project will also involve an extensive local engineering and evaluation program, the biggest that Walkinshaw has ever undertaken.

“This is a dedicated re-engineering program, led by Toyota Australia and made possible by our global partners and is closely supported by our parent company and Toyota North America,” Toyota Australia’s vice-president of sales, Sean Hanley says.

While there will always be a huge market for manufacturers engaged in the “cookie-cutter” approach to car building where building at scale generates big profits, there’s ever-growing wriggle room for the niche approach, in the clever, adaptable Australian way of doing much with very little.

“It bothers me that the last big Australian plan around how we can play in the automotive space was focused on the global,” Cucksley says.

“It [the global car plan] was released at the same time that Tesla first released its [EV] roadster.

“And look at what and where we could have been now if we were engaged in building the future then, rather than building the past.”

The revival of Australia’s manufacturing industry is focused on building the future

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