The improvised production line was in a disused Geelong wool storage warehouse while construction was in progress of a factory several miles away, in an area later renamed Norlane.

[2] In 1934, the company released a coupé utility based on the US Model A Ford "Closed Cab Pickup Truck" that had been produced for six years from 1928.

[2][3] During the Great Depression, banks would not extend credit to farmers to purchase passenger cars, contending they were unnecessary luxuries.

The coupé utility fulfilled the need of farmers to have a workhorse which could also be used, as a well-known saying went: "to take the wife to church on Sunday and the pigs to the market on Monday".

[2] In 2009, the parent Ford company, seeking to avoid the Chapter 11 bankruptcy that had already befallen General Motors and Chrysler, began abandoning overseas projects.

By about July 2009, Ford Australia had received permission from Detroit to add a new small car to its Falcon production line.

On 23 May 2013, Ford Australia announced that it would leave the Australian market after 88 years due to uncompetitive manufacturing costs and lacklustre sales.

Remaining Australian-based engineers would have a "strategic role" in developing a new medium-sized pick-up truck for Ford and the German brand, the automaker said.

Initially, they assembled the UK sourced Pilot, then a range of British cars, including the Prefect, Anglia, Consul, Zephyr and Zodiac.

In 1977, lack of capacity required the Cortina wagon to be assembled in Renault's (now long since closed) Australian factory in Heidelberg, Victoria.

In 1989 the Telstar sedan was replaced by the locally assembled Ford Corsair which was essentially a rebadged Nissan Pintara.

When Nissan shut down its Australian manufacturing operations in 1992 the Telstar nameplate was reintroduced, and as before it was a rebadged and respecced Mazda 626.

It differed little from the American design apart from conversion to right hand drive, and the Falcon soon proved unable to cope on harsh Australian roads, sparking a major effort to introduce improvements to its reliability.

By the mid-1960s, the car was substantially different from its North American cousin and was offered in sedan, wagon, coupé, utility and panel van styles.

The XD and XE generation Falcons (1979-1984) followed the styling trends of Ford Europe's Granada II model, but were still purely an Australian design from an engineering standpoint and had virtually no parts commonality with the European product.

The Fairlane topped Australian luxury car sales for two decades before its gradual downfall started in the late 1980s with the rising importation of European models such as BMW and Mercedes Benz.

In 2007, Ford Australia announced it would be cancelling further production of the Fairlane and LTD beyond the 2007 model year, citing falling sales and an uncertain future in the full-size luxury market.

With the backing of large-volume exports to overseas markets, the Holden Statesman and Caprice then became the sole full-size extended wheelbase luxury models until their demise in 2017.