An opportunity missed?

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It's been one of the verities of the Australian large car market -- large, locally manufactured cars are more likely to succeed with rear-wheel drive.

In all the years that Toyota has been promoting the Camry, Avalon and Aurion as viable large car contenders, Ford and Holden have been -- until quite recently --happily selling large cars in a rear-wheel drive sellers' market.

Even now, with large cars perceived to be costlier to run, the large car segment is one of the very few in Australia that Toyota cannot dominate. And if Toyota struggles to make an impact in this segment, how hard has it been for Mitsubishi?

From the moment Mitsubishi Motors Australia (MMAL) unveiled the original TM model Magna in 1985, the company's large car segment entries were well regarded and widely praised. Buyers who were happy to see Ford and Holden's large car duopoly nipped in the bud, took a bit of a gamble -- and many of them came back. But there was always that silent majority that wouldn't consider either the Magna or its successor, the 380.

What if MMAL could have developed a rear-wheel-drive large car and offset the development costs by building a similar car for export markets? Such a possibility presented itself when Chrysler (then partnered with Mercedes-Benz) was looking for a plant to build RHD versions of the 300C.

It was reported around the time that the 380 was launched in 2005, that MMAL had earlier mounted a strong business case to assume the responsibility for RHD production of the Chrysler 300C and -- with the remaining capacity -- build a new large car based on the outgoing W210 Mercedes-Benz E-Class platform.

Since the 300C shares some of its underpinnings with the W210 Merc, the production line could have been profitable and efficient, but according to insiders, there was a cultural gulf between the Japanese, the Germans and the Americans -- with Mitsubishi's Australian operation caught in the centre.

As an industry insider put it: "The timing was wrong and the figures just didn't add up".

"Rob [McEniry, current MMAL President and CEO] definitely came to Mitsubishi with a view to closing the plant down. [But] He was very quickly of the [opposing view] that the plant actually had a lot of value in the Mitsubishi world.

"A lot of money has been spent on that factory and there aren't many factories in the world that could actually [turn] a profit making 30,000 cars. He saw that as a jewel Mitsubishi should keep -- and that's why he worked so hard to keep it [going].

"There were serious discussions with Proton about exporting the 380 to Malaysia in knocked-down form -- and that's pretty much where the rumours of the four-cylinder 380 came from," our source revealed.

Eventually right-hand drive production of the Chrysler was allocated to the Graz plant in Austria for RHD production, and following the collapse of the Chrysler-Benz collaboration it will now go back to North America. The prospect of a rear-wheel drive car to go head-to-head with Falcon and Commodore evaporated even before the "merger of equals".

But just for a moment imagine a Commodore-sized car, built on the refined and sophisticated W210 platform alongside RHD production of the 300C for other markets. That would have been a viable product portfolio for an efficient manufacturer in a politically benign and economically stable market.

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