Ford had intended on developing the car with left-hand-drive export potential, and received federal and state government grants to assist, but in October 2007, it was announced by Ford Australia president Tom Gorman that the left-hand-drive Falcon project was to be abandoned and the export-incentive grant money would be directed to construction of the Ford Focus small car in Australia. In the end, the Focus project did not proceed as its parent company messed up a lucrative local component sourcing arrangement, so the Asia-Pacific production of that model was instead started at a new plant in Thailand in June 2012. As the FG Falcon utilises much of the previous model's architecture, converting it to left-hand drive would have been a costly and time-consuming process.