Ford Australia has moved quickly to discount a report from America that global rear-wheel drive development, encompassing local Falcon engineering, would necessarily be based in the US.

The report, quoting a market analyst's remarks concerning the economic viability of global rear-wheel drive development in Australia, was published in The Detroit News on the weekend (more here).

"It's too early to speculate on that," said Sinead McAlary, Ford's Australian Manager of Public Affairs.

The global rear-wheel drive project is expected to be based out of a Centre of Expertise -- in common with other Ford projects around the world -- but the location of that CoE is "not yet decided", according to McAlary.

McAlary would not express an opinion on the respective economic merits of developing a platform in the US versus Australia, but the R&D facilities are here, only recently established and already tested under fire with the introduction of the FG Falcon next month.

She did say that with over "a thousand engineers" working out of those new R&D facilities (more here), Ford Australia's engineers would not be pushed to capacity handling the T6 light commercial vehicle project -- for which Ford Australia IS the global CoE -- in parallel with other future endeavours, including Falcon.

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