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1999 AU falcon has design cues of a 2011 MB CLS class, I'll let others judge whether that means its a decade in front of popular aesthetics as an subjective opinion.

Some durability test results (if they ever saw a public forum) and internal opinion (obviously heavily biased) might suggest that the AU was the better built car, but to fix the aesthetics, BA was bought forward, with cost cutting programs to offset the earlier then expected tooling costs, particularly where the AU was far superior to its major competitor at the time.
Just about everyone agreed it looked better.