Rover

» see mg-rover.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

John Kemp Starley and William Sutton set up in Coventry in 1878, and seven years later Starley built the thing the company should really be remembered for. The Rover safety bicycle of 1885 had two wheels of the same size and a chain to the rear one, which is the layout every bicycle on earth still uses. It was successful enough in eastern Europe that the Polish word for bicycle is still rower.

Starley died in 1901 and the firm went into cars three years later with the Rover Eight. What Rover became over the following half century was the sensible British saloon, wood and leather without quite being a Jaguar, and its best years were the P4 and the P6. The 2000 took the first European Car of the Year award in 1964. Somewhere off to the side, almost as an afterthought, the company had also launched the Land Rover in 1948, which turned out to be the only part of the business anyone would still want fifty years later.

Rover joined the Leyland Motor Corporation in 1967, which merged with the British Motor Corporation the following year to make British Leyland. That is where the story turns into the standard account of British manufacturing in the 1970s: too many marques chasing the same buyer, and a government that ended up nationalizing the whole thing in 1975 after the Ryder report. The SD1 of 1976 won Car of the Year and then spent a decade being an argument about build quality.

British Aerospace took the Rover Group off the state in 1988, and BMW bought it in 1994 for around 800 million pounds. Munich called it the English patient in private and then in public, and the losses ran into the billions while BMW sent more and more of its own people to Birmingham to get a grip on it. Six years in, they gave up.

The breakup in May 2000 was surgical. Land Rover went to Ford for about 1.8 billion pounds. BMW kept the Mini and the plant at Cowley. What was left was the Longbridge site and the volume car business with the MG and Rover badges on it, and that went to the Phoenix Consortium for ten pounds.

~ the case file ~

~ the ten pound company ~

Phoenix was four Midlands businessmen led by John Towers, and the plan was to keep Longbridge open long enough to find a partner with a model range. The trouble was the clock. The 25 and the 45 were already rebadged 1990s cars when the consortium took delivery of them, and the 75 was the only recent design in the building. Developing a replacement was a multi-billion-pound exercise that a company bought for a tenner was never going to fund. Sales held up at first. 2001 was the best year, over 170,000 cars.

By 2004 the number was nearer 120,000 and the search for a partner had narrowed to Shanghai Automotive. Those talks ran into the spring of 2005 and then collapsed, and the reasoning attributed to the Chinese side was hard to argue with: if BMW could not make this company profitable, the question of who could was not really open. Phoenix had also been paying itself rather well throughout, which became its own inquiry later.

~ the last day at longbridge ~

PricewaterhouseCoopers were appointed administrators on 8 April 2005. More than six thousand people at Longbridge lost their jobs, with something like thirty thousand more across the supply chain in the West Midlands. Nanjing Automobile bought the assets on 22 July for roughly 53 million pounds and started crating the production line for shipment to China. MG assembly came back to Longbridge in a small way and finished there for good in 2016. The Rover name itself went to Ford in 2006, bought defensively so that nobody could put it near Land Rover, and passed to Tata with Jaguar Land Rover in 2008, where it sits dormant to this day.

~ the badge in izmir ~

There is a Turkish end to this that outlived the English one. BMC Sanayi ve Ticaret was founded in İzmir in 1964 by Ergün Özakat, with the British Motor Corporation taking 26 percent of it, and production started in 1966 with Austin and Morris models assembled under license. When BMC in Britain merged with Leyland in 1968, the İzmir factory's parent became British Leyland, which is the same conglomerate Rover had walked into the year before. For a while the badge on a Turkish truck and the badge on a Solihull saloon reported to the same head office.

Çukurova Holding bought BMC outright in 1989 and the TMSF seized it in 2013. The company is now one of the larger defense manufacturers in the country, building the Altay tank and the Kirpi. The licensor is twenty years dead, with its tooling crated off to Nanjing and its name parked in a Tata filing cabinet. The licensee is in İzmir making armor for the Turkish army.

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