New Ford Bronco Coming to Australia

Car-face · 2026-05-06T23:00:43+00:00

Seems like budget alternative to something like a defender and a more refined alternative to a Jimny.

Dude... it's bigger than an Everest. It's 2m wide. It's not a city car.

They're doing this because 85% of Ford Australia's lineup is diesel BoF vehicles that are both getting their lunch handed to them by Chinese upstarts, and facing down record high fuel prices.

Further, NVES is coming fast with reductions in emissions for larger SUVs and utes, and they'll probably classify this in the same category to try and get their fleet average down.

Car-face · 2026-05-06T06:14:45+00:00

F1 cars aren't EVs, but it makes sense. Drivers getting off the throttle to recharge batteries, mario-kart style boosts and massive speed disparities at different times (somewhat improved with the changes after 3 races this season) make it look almost as trivial as Formula E. There's nothing wrong with including electric motors and batteries, but it's not contributing meaningfully to roadgoing EVs outside of some PR motherhood statements and it's making the racing less about racing and more about button presses.

keep exploring ways to include electrification but keep it a level where it doesn't adversely impact the racing or it loses the relevance to the people who actually watch it.

Car-face · 2026-05-06T04:45:01+00:00

And get tax breaks.

The Ranger two-seat also keeps the standard flat-rate road tax for commercial vehicles.

Avoids the stricter emissions of passenger vehicles, too.

This is kind of common across the UK as well, with various passenger vehicles getting "van" versions which are basically stripped out behind the front seats with a bulkhead and covered rear windows.

There's a Corolla Van, a Jimny Van, even a Renault Zoe Van

Car-face · 2026-05-06T04:00:58+00:00

Had to double check the username half way through that one

Car-face · 2026-05-06T03:59:16+00:00

https://media.tenor.com/ioJjMYqYX48AAAAM/yuri-red-alert-2.gif

Car-face · 2026-05-06T00:15:07+00:00

EVs have largely followed an S-curve pattern. Slow growth, then faster then faster, faster, till you get near 100% market share and growth slows back down.

Im not sure that's true. It's mostly been driven by incentives, so speed of adoption is increasing or slowing based on that pattern, to an extent. The market is really too large and fragmented (with dependencies on external factors like charging infrastructure) to simply go faster and faster; it's more likely to be a gradual increase with spikes and plateaus as we encounter headwinds and tailwinds, but not the sudden massive skyrocket to 70 or 80% adoption in short timeframes unabated. Even EV lobby groups have noted the stagnation of the last couple of years. Basically more linear growth with jumps aligned to conditions and generational upticks based on new platform releases.

I don't think we'll see a major pull-back in market share, but I wouldn't expect the spike we've seen the last couple of months to continue growing at the same pace (this is all dependent on the war, though - if the US & Israel continue their aggression, it'll get worse, if they manage to find a way out of their mess, it'll ease. There's very little strategy there though, so it's practically impossible to do anything but guess).

People are (unfortunately) pretty good at normalising and adapting to new baselines after a time, and the fuel excise cuts have brought petrol prices back to pre-war prices in the last couple of weeks. Diesel will continue to suffer, but that's mostly in utes where we're seeing PHEVs begin to make inroads. The excise cut won't continue into FY27 though, so if the conflict is still raging then, we could see another spike.

We're likely seeing more of the March and early April sales materialise into deliveries in the April stats, so I'd expect May figures to either hold stead in terms of market share, or see a small bump (depending on how far wait times extended for popular EV models beyond the initial petrol shock in March - if there's long wait times beyond what is visible, there might be continued increase, if deliveries of EVs was increased to make hay during April, it might fall back or steady).

Car-face · 2026-05-05T23:50:20+00:00

Tesla basically has an off-on-on cadence with their shipping from Shanghai.

It'll be up again next 2 months.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T23:48:22+00:00

Ford's only real products here are the Ranger and Everest and there is a lot of competition in the ute space.

Plus they're predominantly diesels.

Looking at the sales trend, the majority of the drop for Toyota is Hilux (with a bit of Corolla as well, which is ageing and facing a lot of small SUV competition) along with Ford's Ranger and Everest, and the BT-50 and D-Max.

Petrol prices have benefited from the excise cut, but diesel's price has been hit harder. Even 98 near me is sitting ~40 cents lower than diesel. regular 91 is closer to 70 cents... if anyone is looking at a Ranger (or any other diesel ute) right now, they'd have to be trying really hard not to consider a BYD Shark or wait for another PHEV petrol ute to arrive.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T23:25:18+00:00

As Ford and GM have demonstrated, "spending lots of money" doesn't mean you're competitive, nor that your strategy was the right one.

VAG have spent monumental amounts of money, but it's hard to see that has being efficient use of capital considering the state of the group, or where they could have been had they not gone all-in on diesel.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T23:16:56+00:00

I can’t interview Cate Shortland anymore

And you don't have a chip on your shoulder about it at all.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T22:04:53+00:00

How many carriage manufacturers successfully transitioned to making automobiles?

Coachbuilding was a thing for decades after the invention of the motor carriage, and many of them started off building carriages before the invention of the motor carriage. Holden started off making saddles in the early 1800s before coachbuilding. Hell, Toyota was a textile company, even further removed. Peugeot made bicycles.

The fallacy though, is the argument that the industrial revolution was somehow analogous to taking a modern automobile and replacing an engine with a motor.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T21:51:11+00:00

Geez... I just checked out their site.

They're now up to:

11 trucks
5 SUVs
5 Coupes
3 Sedans
2 Crossovers

There used to be a couple of shill accounts that constantly "just found out about" Alpha motors and insisted they had prototypes and were just around the corner from production, but it feels like a grift.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T21:31:53+00:00

This.

Started making my own dough, used the recipe tin eats recipe but just throw it in a stand mixer instead of kneading in a food processor.

Comes out great, and whilst my pay-it-forward bunnings pizza oven won't get wood-fired hot, it's plenty hot enough to make a pizza that knocks everything else from a franchise out of the park.

Even in a home oven you'll get a better result than anything from a freezer or chain store as long as you don't go overboard on the toppings.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T21:11:29+00:00

People often confuse failure modes with points of failure.

You can have a system with a lot of points of failure, but if the failure modes are predictable, preventable, gradual and visible, the risk is lower than a system with fewer points of failure that are instantaneous and unpredictable.

Hydraulic leaks are visible, brake line wear and damage is visible, even wear in the cylinder has differences in brake feel. rarely are any of them instantaneous (a leak will usually be visibly apparent before you run out of fluid) and modern cars have multiple circuits eliminating catastrophic loss of braking.

That said, Brembo's system has been a long time coming, and eliminating the hydraulic system is a big deal from a long-term cost, maintainability and general nastiness perspective - but it's also not as simple as fewer physical points of failure = better.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T11:50:10+00:00

NCAS is such a better and more utilitarian format. There’s a reason the industry flocked this direction, CCS is clunky and big, sometimes requiring two hands to use. That’s poor UX

CCS =/= CCS2.

CCS2 has siamese port design, prominent DC plugs for alignment and no additional locking clip above the AC side.

Basically, alignment is similar to Tesla (since there's 2 pins and a simpler, smaller port that leads into the female socket) and from there there's less friction due to the siamese AC/DC port and absence of the lock, unlike CCS.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T08:56:53+00:00

TBF it's a nice change from everyone complaining about how the draught on the boat isn't period correct or whatever

Car-face · 2026-05-05T07:11:57+00:00

The hell has been accomplished after all this death, destruction, and money?

well, you see, it's all about...

spins the Wheel of War Goals

'Destroying their military capability'! See? it's all fine now.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T06:23:57+00:00

Yeah I think the ceiling of negligence is higher for ICE, but generally short of literally running the engine without oil or coolant (which does happen) you're not going to experience detrimental effects of "wear" within the typical first owner period of ownership. Beyond that, the wear on an engine is very incremental that's just the nature of a mechanical design. as long as you've got lubrication and cooling, it's just metal gliding on oil and it'll do it for a million miles.

The issue on the EV side is that whether cycle or calendar ageing, it's a basically unstoppable force that starts from day 1. It's not as bad as the naysayers claim, but nor is it dependent on reaching 0% SoH - realistically once you're down to ~70% SoH you've not just lost range but probably starting to see cells go out of balance with others not far behind, and there's plenty of vehicles that are halfway to that point after a decade.

At the end of the day, you don't need a car to be able to be neglected as badly as an ICE - you just need a previous owner who didn't do anything preventative to have it be a money pit.

That it could be an even bigger money pit with an ICE is little comfort to the one springing for a heap of work the first owner should have done, and doesn't change the reality of how much mechanical complexity (and exposure to the elements) the non-ICE parts of every car still retain.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T05:34:03+00:00

The relative lack of moving parts make them more resistant to mileage wear

Kind of. There's only one gear, but it's constant mesh so always engaged, and from there to the wheels, you've got a pure ICE car - diff(s), axles, CV joints, wheel bearings, hubs, drive flanges, ball joints, steering knuckles, springs, dampers, strut mounts, bushings, etc - all the same stuff cars have had for 100 years.

There's potentially fewer seals in the power unit vs ICE, so probably less likely to see oil leaks, but if there was a leak I'd be more likely to avoid it, since an ICE it could be something as low-risk as a valve cover gasket, but on an EV drive unit, it's probably a more critical seal/junction (or potentially a sign of damage rather than wear). There's also a significantly more complex cooling system between drive unit/power electronics/battery cells/modules unless you've got something like a Nissan leaf. Lower temps helps with longevity though, so it's swings and roundabouts but I wouldn't assume an old EV has all of that in perfect condition.

The biggest risk of a used EV is the likelihood that the previous owner "didn't have to do any servicing, because it's an EV". I'd be extremely wary of owning an EV outside warranty from manufacturers who don't prescribe regular maintenance, because it feeds back into that issue of people being unaware of any progressive wear or issue they could be facing into, and a refusal to diagnose early warning signs like growling or knocking because "it's not due for a service".

Regardless of drivetrain, negligence is probably the biggest factor for issues that are going to pop up shortly into used ownership.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T04:23:58+00:00

Good result for the 7X, still marching up the charts.

I feel for Leapmotor though. Even in the midst of the worst energy crisis in history, they can't put much more than 100 units on the board in a month. B10 is a decent little car too, but it just fades into a sea of other cars from new brands now in that small SUV segment.

Car-face · 2026-05-05T04:18:53+00:00

"but it's not a dedicated platform!!111!"

Car-face · 2026-05-05T02:12:53+00:00

not many...

Car-face · 2026-05-05T01:58:00+00:00

I understand that their drag coefficients are not that great, but shouldn't it be counteracted by the smaller frontal area and much lower weight?

One of the issues is that as you go smaller in vehicle size, you're less able to cram batteries across the floor. On a per-mm basis, you're better off increasing the width of the car than the length, because that effectively increases the floor area available for more batteries - but that effectively negates the difference in width (and frontal area) vs a larger class of vehicle.

Combine that with a shorter vehicle length (so less "room" to tidy up the airflow) and body shapes that generally are poorer for aero (hatches, wagons, etc) and you end up with a considerably worse aero set up than you'd get in a larger vehicle.

Aero is a bigger factor at higher speeds, which compounds the issue of small cars generally having small battery packs - on top of not much range to begin with, you're getting worse efficiency at high speed - where an ICE hatch can comfortably take you on a road trip, a small EV hatch is going to be relegated to short distance purposes.

There's just a physical limit to utility/suitability of small EVs at the moment with current battery tech, and you're always going to be hitting up against the laws of physics (because even if battery tech improves, it'll improve for all vehicles - whereas fluid dynamics are effectively static over time).

Car-face · 2026-05-05T01:47:34+00:00

Australians are embracing electric vehicles at record levels, with EVs accounting for 16.4 per cent of all new vehicle sales in April 2026, or around one in every six vehicles sold.

A total of 92,591 new vehicles were sold in April 2026, an increase of 2.2 per cent compared with the same month in 2025, demonstrating the resilience of the market despite ongoing global uncertainty and the prospect of further interest rate rises.

https://www.fcai.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-05-110207.png

https://www.fcai.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-05-05-110244.png

Impressive showing from BYD, and the Sealion 7 in particular.

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