Hammond: "Bathurst is a place where every year Ford and Holden fans travel to fight each other... and every so often a race breaks out."
Whats even bigger news is Fords leading team and defending champions, Team Vodafone Triple8 racing have switched to Holden for 2010! Because Ford dropped funding to the team.... go figure!
but on the origins of the Coupe Utility it appears to be correct
Origin
Subaru Baja: profile view with bed-mounted bike rack. Marketed from 2003–2006 in the USA, Canada and Chile, the Baja featured four-doors and derived from the Subaru Outback platform.
Ford Australia was the first to integrate a cargo area with the bodywork of a passenger car.[1], as the result of a request from a farmers wife in Victoria, in 1935. Ford Australia combined the cab of its newly released Ford Coupé body with a well-type load area fully integrated into the coupé body, producing the first 'Coupé Utilities'.[2] Holden built a Chevrolet ute in 1935, but utes were not sold in America until the 1957 Ford Ranchero. Both types of vehicles were called "utilities" or "utes" for short.
Both the Coupe Utility and the Roadster pickup continued in production, but the improving economy of the mid to late 1930s and the desire for improved comfort saw coupe utility sales climb at the expense of the roadster pickup until, by 1939, the roadster pickup was all but a fading memory. No car maker offered a roadster pickup or ute when car production restarted after World War II.
By the 1980s in North America, the coupé utility began to fall out of favor again with the demise of the Ranchero after 1979, the Volkswagen Caddy, Dodge Rampage/Plymouth Scamp and of the Chevrolet El Camino by 1987.
Subaru offered the Brat in the early 1980s, and the Baja from 2003-2006. General Motors considered bringing a rebadged Holden Ute to the United States in the form of the Pontiac G8 ST in the late 2000s, but the global recession (and GM's ultimate bankruptcy) caused them to cancel it.
The pickup truck, on the other hand, started its life a little earlier and is defined by its separate, removable, well-type 'pickup bed'. This pickup bed does not contact the cabin part of the vehicle, while the ute bed is an integral part of the whole body. Both the Coupé Utility and Closed Cab pickup designs migrated to light truck chassis & these are correctly known respectively as Utility trucks & Pickup trucks. Eventually the pickup design found a natural home on the smaller truck chassis while the ute became entrenched as a passenger car derivitave, although exceptions do apply