THE AUTOMOTIVE YEAR: One event guaranteed we won't see this year

For sale: automotive manufacturing industry, several careless owners, difficult fixer-upper, remote location, demanding tenants, closed for inspection at 13 Poisoned Chalice Court, Lower Apathy.

Any takers?

This is how companies abroad perceive Australia as a manufacturing base. There's zero opportunity to make money by building cars here.

The sort of cars that we could actually build here and would sell in any sort of volume in other markets – Holden's Cruze for example, or the Toyota Camry – can be built elsewhere much cheaper.

And being built practically anywhere else guarantees lower-cost shipping of the finished product to any export market (including Australia itself).

And the cars that we do build here, which have been profitable in the past – Falcon, Commodore and Territory, for instance – are niche models hindered by being dated designs built down to a cost, or engineered for right-hand drive only, or incapable of passing emissions or crash safety regs in other markets.

The Aussie dollar up until the last 12 months has been too high for Australian-built cars to be successfully exported in numbers that would satisfy the bean counters at car company head offices.

What Australia can offer a foreign company is design and engineering talent. As is often the case, however, our time zone precludes that talent being employed in its home market. Any vehicle manufacturer that hints there are opportunities available in Australia, is, in reality, more likely planning to head-hunt staff selectively than buy up fully operational factories. Manufacturing plants in Australia will be the cheap housing estates of the future.

Perhaps it's time for Australia to give up on mass-market production and head down the track of cottage industry car manufacture.

Perhaps, also, it's time to stop waiting for a foreign multinational to come in and pick up the pieces.