G'Day Guys, well, there are no "genuine" Mad Max "clone" cars Andy, because they only made one for the first movie, and totally destroyed a second "stunt" car in Mad Max 2. The one remaining original movie car was sold to a "celebrity movie car" museum in Britain, where it remains the most popular exhibit. Your mate can buy it though, for a cool 1 million US dollars, I believe.
Anyway, Scott Smith here in Melbourne (who had nothing to do with the original car, in fact, he has never seen it up close) built that car and sold it to your mate, and it was featured in a magazine and a documentary, and other Mad Max fans in the US and Japan ordered several more, so he builds them and sells them worldwide. To Scott's credit they are very close to the original car, which was built for peanuts, in fact the first movie was made for 300,000 bucks, and grossed over 200 million, and was second only to The Blair Witch Project in achieving the highest return from a movie in history.
Scott has done a lot of research and built the fibreglass "Monza" front and rear wing etc, from original moulds, and has actually developed a working supercharger that he can switch on and off just like Max did, it looks just like the non working one in the movie, and if you order one of his cars, he'll sell you one as an option.
While there are probably similarities in all Ford designed cars, the XA, and then XB coupes drew some vague styling cues from the Mustang lineage, in particular the Mach 1, if it wasn't for "Starsky and Hutch", no-one in Oz would know what a Torino was. Any similarity between US and Aussie Ford Falcons disappeared in the mid 1960's though, so from about 1967 onward, our Falcons probably only shared some mechanical components, like those lovely Cleveland and (less lovely) Windsor V8's, the magnificent 9 inch diff etc. And to my knowledge, all the Aussie built Falcons after then were Aussie designs.
If you're thinking about building your own Mad Max cars, be aware that the XA and XB coupes were pretty thin on the ground even back in the 1970's, and are quite collectible, even those that suffered as they did from extensive rust-outs, the 1970's Fords deserved the "Rust Bucket" tag, more than any other car in history, apart from any British car, of course. As a side note, I actually got a close up look of the original car after Mad Max 1 and sat in it too, so among all the other lingering historic smells in that car, are some choice "Terry Farts", ha ha!
Here's a pic of an XB coupe, as you can see, it shares very little with the Torino. Oh, and I forgot to answer another question, yes, the new Pontiac G8 is an Aussie Holden Commodore SS.
