Australasia is the home of four-wheel drive utes. From production lines in Thailand, Korea, the USA and Japan, 4WDs have stormed Australian and New Zealand sales charts for years.

But long before the Ranger, D-Max, Navara and Triton became super-powers here, Aussie gave us a locally-made 4WD ute.

This is a rare Ford Falcon XY 4×4 ute – just 432 of them were ever made and they were exclusively sold in the Australian market. A few have made their way to New Zealand, but they don’t get out into the bush much these days.

The Ford Falcon XY 4X4 ute was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a potential new 4WD for the Australian armed forces.

The project showed a lot of promise, and there was a surge in interest in the vehicle from regular Australians after spy shots of an early prototype appeared in the press.

The military version of the XY 4X4 ute would never see the light of day as the army opted to stick with more familiar body-on-chassis designs from Land Rover.

Due to public demand, 432 XY ute chassis were converted to full 4×4 and offered for sale in 1973.

In the late 1960s the Australian military was looking to acquire new four-wheel drive vehicles that would be a little more powerful than the four-cylinder Land Rovers they then had in service.

Ford Australia got wind of this potentially lucrative new military contract and set to work developing a four-wheel drive version of its model XY ute.

Ford was working closely with Willys at the time, the local importer of Jeeps, supplying engines and other parts from the Falcon model line to ensure that spare parts availability for Australian Jeep owners would be straight forward.

As a result of this connection Ford had access to Jeep’s highly respected drivetrain hardware.

In the end the military decided to stay with the rugged body-on-chassis Land Rover, stepping up to a six-cylinder engine.

Despite missing out on the military contract, Ford executives decided to stay the course and develop a production version of the car. Spy shots of a prototype had been published in the media and the public reaction had been overwhelmingly positive.

The biggest challenge faced by the engineering team was getting a leaf-sprung front axle assembly under the XY Falcon
Significant strengthening and reinforcement was necessary front and back, particularly in the front where new steel frames were added from the firewall forwards to better cope with the weight and loads of the live axle.

The inline six-cylinder engine needed to be tilted to one side to allow clearance between the sump and the front differential, this also required an angled adapter be fitted to the intake to keep the carburettor level.

Power was provided by the venerable Ford Falcon six-cylinder 4.1 litre overhead valve engine. It produced 115kW (155bhp) at 4,000 rpm and a healthy 325Nm (240ft- lb) of torque at just 1,600 rpm, making it ideal for off-road use.

Power went through a Borg Warner AS5 T15A three-speed synchromesh manual gearbox, and from there to a Spicer Model 20 two-speed transfer case. As was common in the era the brakes were drums front and back along with 16" steel wheels and relatively slim 6.00” x 16" all-terrain tires.

The finished product weighed 1642 kg, had 200mm of ground clearance and could also be ordered from the factory with a winch.

A production run of 432 vehicles was planned, no one is quite sure why this specific number was chosen.
Due to the labour-intensive nature of the build process of the Falcon XY 4X4 they were all essentially hand-built, with assembly taking place on weekends in order to avoid slowing down the main Falcon production line during the week.

Ford developed a series of three options for the XY 4X4 which are now exceedingly rare, they included an 8,000 lb Power Take-Off (PTO) winch shaft-driven from the centrally mounted transfer case; a heavy-duty tow bar; and a steel-framed canvas canopy.

Looking forward four decades and Ford in Australia has now all but discontinued its regular car sales with just the small Puma left in production – the rest of the model range consists of SUVs, 4WD utes and commercial vehicles.

These days, with the Ranger dominant on both sides of the Tasman Sea, it’s hard to visualise a time when a domestically designed Ford ute was a rare outlier among the Falcons, Valiants and Holdens most people drove, but the XY can arguably be seen as carving a niche that prepared the way for the current ‘must-have’ status of 4WD utes.