Ford Falcon 2014 GT

Ford has built a full-size, rear-wheel-drive Falcon continuously in Australia since 1960, and most American muscle car fans have never seen one. It played Mad Max’s own car on screen, runs down speeders as an Australian police interceptor, and in 2014 offered a turbocharged six-cylinder quick enough to embarrass plenty of V8 rivals. Read on to find out why this nameplate’s long run was already nearing its end.

Somewhere in Australia, Ford has been building a full-size, rear-wheel-drive muscle car continuously since 1960 — and if you live in the United States, there’s a good chance you’ve never seen one in person. It’s fast enough that Australian police use it to run down speeders on the highway, famous enough that it played Mad Max’s own car in one of the franchise’s most iconic films, and powerful enough in its top trim to embarrass a good number of European performance sedans costing far more. It’s also, as of 2014, running out of road, caught between emissions rules that already killed its fastest version once and a market that was quietly moving on from cars like this one altogether.

A Car Built for a Region the U.S. Never Sees

The Falcon is produced entirely by Ford’s Australian division and, in its 2014 form, came in eight distinct versions serving markets across South East Asia, including New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, and Indonesia. None of them were ever sold in North American showrooms, which is part of why the nameplate is so unfamiliar to American muscle car fans despite more than five decades of continuous production — a run that outlasts nearly every American muscle car badge from the same era, most of which were killed off, revived, and killed off again at least once along the way. It’s a run length that puts the Falcon in the same conversation as the Chevrolet Corvette and the Ford Mustang for continuous nameplates, despite most enthusiasts outside Australia never having driven one.

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The Version Mad Max Actually Drove

The current seventh generation began in 2008, and while the Falcon’s Mad Max fame is absolutely real, it belongs to a much earlier car: the V8 Interceptor from Mad Max and The Road Warrior is a 1973 XB GT hardtop, not anything from this generation. What the seventh-gen car did give Australian highway police was a genuine factory interceptor, the XR8, running a naturally aspirated 5.4-liter Boss 290 quad-cam V8 rated at 290 kW, or 389 horsepower — more than enough to catch nearly anything else on the road. Ford pulled the XR8 in April 2010 because the Boss 290 could not clear Euro 4 emissions rules, though the company had plans to bring the badge back later in the 2014 model year, this time with the supercharged 5.0-liter Boss V8 lifted straight out of the FPV GT and rated at a genuinely serious 335 kW, or 449 horsepower.

The Six-Cylinder That Embarrasses V8s

For 2014, the quickest version in the regular Falcon lineup wasn’t a V8 at all — it was the XR6, powered by a turbocharged 4.0-liter inline-six producing 270 kW, or 361 horsepower, and 533 Nm of torque held flat from 1,250 all the way to 5,750 rpm. That’s an unusually wide, unusually low torque plateau for a turbocharged engine of this era, and it let the six-cylinder Falcon run 0-100 km/h in 5.1 seconds, a time that would put plenty of larger-displacement V8 rivals, and a fair number of European performance sedans in the same class, to shame. The engine picked up a larger intercooler and a higher compression ratio over previous versions, adding roughly 5 kW over its immediate predecessor. That kind of six-cylinder performance forced Ford’s own engineers to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that forced induction had made large-displacement V8s optional rather than mandatory for a genuinely quick full-size sedan.

Three Ways to Send Power to the Wheels

Buyers could choose between a five-speed automatic, a six-speed ZF automatic comparable to units found in some Jaguar and BMW models, or the sole manual option, a conventional six-speed that Ford itself acknowledged would be left behind by the sharper-shifting, better-geared automatics in a straight comparison. Ford’s official fuel economy claim for the XR6 Turbo configuration was 11.7 L/100 km, or about 20.1 mpg combined, though real-world driving under normal conditions tends to land closer to 14.9 L/100 km, or roughly 15.7 mpg — a gap between claimed and actual economy that’s fairly typical for a turbocharged performance sedan of this size and era. None of these transmission choices came with a meaningful price difference between them, so the decision mostly came down to whether a given buyer actually wanted to shift gears themselves.

A Steering Rack With an Australian Accent

The Falcon uses a Bishop Y-shaped steering rack built around what the company calls a virtual pivot system, delivering highly responsive steering feel across just 2.6 turns from lock to lock. Nineteen-inch alloy wheels wrapped in low-profile Dunlop tires keep the car planted through fast corners, though the suspension tune leans soft enough that rough, unpaved roads — common across the outlying regions of the markets this car actually serves — aren’t its strongest environment. It’s a deliberate trade-off: a chassis tuned for the paved highways of its home markets rather than the rougher backroads found throughout much of the territory it’s sold into.

An Interior That Doesn’t Feel Like an Afterthought

Inside, the Falcon offers leather-bound bucket seats with electric adjustment, two-zone climate control, and an eight-speaker stereo system with voice control and Bluetooth built in. An eight-inch touchscreen handles satellite navigation and pairs with parking sensors and a reversing camera, while rear passengers get generous legroom and a trunk large enough to swallow multiple sets of golf clubs, with a folding rear seatback for larger cargo when needed. Buyers cross-shopping this car against European sedans costing considerably more consistently found the Falcon’s cabin held up in a direct comparison, not just on paper but in daily use. None of this reads as remarkable by modern standards, but it underscores that the Falcon was never positioned as a stripped-down performance special.

A Nameplate Running Out of Road

What makes the 2014 Falcon worth knowing about isn’t just its performance figures — it’s the fact that this continuous, 54-year production run was already nearing its end by the time this generation reached showrooms. Emissions regulations had already killed the highest-output XR8 once, and the broader shift away from large, locally built rear-wheel-drive sedans across the Australian market meant Ford’s Falcon program was fighting a battle few of its American muscle car counterparts ever had to face in quite the same way. Whatever came next for the nameplate, the 2014 lineup stands as one of the last full expressions of a genuinely unusual automotive history.

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