Rover shutdown ??

Since one is owned by Ford (LR) and the other is owned by John Towers and his crew, none whatsoever.....

As for whether Solihull will be closed, that's a question all of its own.

In message , Hirsty's writes

Why?

Ford own Landrover. Nothing to do with Rover anymore

Wasn't the MG badge sold off seperately if I recall correctly? Or was that just the Mini side of things that got split last time around? Whatever It seems like the slippery slope for Rover , politics aside.

Lee D

This may cause a lot of subcontract manufacturers to go out of buisness in the area. This would mean that the subcontract manufacturers would posibly be in competition with people supplying landrover, if they don't go bust, greater competition, lower costs. This element of competition may prevent Land Rover building vehicles abroad to save costs.

Regards JJ

Thought they want to build (Defender) abroad due to lower labour cost? Richard

It'll have no direct effect on LR, but the ineveitable collapse of the supplier companies could well mean component problems to the after-market (there's very little made in the UK on new LR's).

No doubt we will now have endless days of so-called experts pontficating on the reasons for Rovers failure, but like Patricia Hewet (sp?) pretending to be sad on TV last night, they will have just got out of their Audi. The real reason for the failure is that we, unlike the French, Italians and Germans absolutely insist on not supporting our own industry. Personally, I'm waiting for the day that the Stock Exchange is sold to Germany (on the cards by the way) and the b**t*rds who think other peopes jobs going down the pan is good business lose theirs.

Richard

The only thing that surprised me was how long it took for JT to asset strip and kill Rover off altogether. The other bidder in the frame when JT took over Rover for the massive ten quid was accused of planning to asset strip the company, build MG and retire Rover - seems quite odd that they may actually have had the better business plan.

The 'Chinese Deal' was always a small scarlet fish IMO.

The 'gang of four' have all personally done _very_ well out of their ten quid, though.

Not really. There's no longer any question about it.

The plan, AIUI, was to design a car and build it cheaply and China AND build it expensively in the UK. Yes, of course, makes perfect sense....

Oh yes indeedy. the only good thing about the whole, seemingly inevitable, collapse is that it comes at the worst possible moment for Big Tony.

I don't think so either.

So Tim Hobbs was, like

Not much good to say at all (having been part of a mass redundancy myself three years ago), but yes - agreed. My interest is not in watching them squirm (although that will have some entertainment value), but in how they will shift responsibility to someone else and come out smelling of roses. If they can get away with Iraq, they should manage this one. Strangely, they have been putting ministers on the radio to talk about it, which they haven't done for years - usually a short statement blaming the Tories is considered enough for the ignorant public.

On the Today programme this morning (UK radio), Patricia Hewitt said that some of the engines made in the Rover plant were used to power Land Rovers. Which would these be, then? Something little in a Freelander?

Powertrain are still part of Rover - the K Series blocks would be made by Rover and are used in the Freelander (1.8s)

What this also does is screw up Lotus, Caterham, Westfield and a bunch of other small manufactueres who are now going to have to find a replacement small revvy performance engine to replace the K.

Add to this the fact that the PG1 gearbox is supplied to people like Honda and you may well end up with a larger upset than it looked at first sight.

If I had the money I'd be inclined to try and buy out the production line for the 75 and TF, shitcan the 25, 45 and SV and concentrate on extending the 75 up and down market. I'd also look at trying to recreate the design concept that the "Old Firm" did for the Mini - They brought back all of the still living design team from the origial Mini and had them do a treatment that looked like quite a goer until BMW presented something that may as well have been called a 1-series.

I have a suspicion that the finest car that the UK has made in a long time (75) is about to die a horrible death.

Maybe Ford will buy out the IP and have the 75 become the S-Type Jag replacement? Or maybe even the XJ. Not holding out any hopes.

P.

It was inevitable, you can't build cars in an uneconomic factory and there is no point in keeping names alive for nostalgia only. Rover was always a loss maker, kept alive by Land Rover until that morass known as BL took the lot over.

There are just too many cars being built today and the market is unsustainable.

I think Morgan or the only ones with the right idea.

As for Land Rover, they stopped building proper ones in the 1980's didn't they :)

What you propose for the Rover models is roughly what the Chinese had in mind.

In message , Larry writes

The history of this company is riddled with failure to rationalise and kill of old names. Why they insisted on retaining Rover instead of simply calling it MG I don't know - yes I do it's in the history of the company.

What difference do the names make really?

To be honest, I'd have used the brands as the model name.

The TF would have been the MG - traditional brit sportscar.

The 25 would be an Austin - decent family runaround. Nothing special, but good enough

The 45 would be a Morris - bigger than the Austin - again nothing special, but again good enough

The 75 would be the "Rover". It's a rover through and through.

The ZT280 would be a Riley - Sportier saloon car

The 75 Limo would be a Wolesley - bit more upmarket

The Streetwise would be a Triumph - slightly sporty version of the Austin

The Citycar would be a Leyland - No refinement, built by somebody more used to trucks.

So - you'd bring back all of the old marques but as models rather than distinct badge engineering as previously used.

I'd have loved to see what the minds who created the 75 would have done with a bigger car - similar positioning to the old VDP 4000R.

P.

It's not exactly an engine in the first flush of youth though and I cannot imagine that the new Freelander (not far off now) would be using anything other than the contemporary Mondeo / Focus lumps.

Lotus, Caterham et al won't really matter to anyone - Lotus are already using other engines anyway - the Toyota unit in the 111R for example.

So the problem is relatively short term for Ford / LR, so a deal with the administrators should sort something out I should think.

It may be very good (never driven one) but it has lots of BMW in it and hasn't really sold very well. It's also not a particularly fresh model, which is the main problem Rover have faced since at least the BMW days.

I've been driving one for the last three years and the only problem they've consistently had has been the engines which are uniformly weak - even the

2.5 KV6 isn't really up to hauling a 2 ton car around with any haste. The V8 version is using the engine out of the Ford Mustang anyway.

As for a lot of BMW, the claims are that the only significant Beemerishness it has is the Z-Axle which the V8 versions don't have.

The 75 really is a bloody good car, especially at the money. The main problem it's had is the company selling it. BMW dissing it at the press launch didn't help one little bit and since then Rover have been on such a rollercoaster ride that nobody's felt safe buying one in case the support for it vanished.

I don't know anybody who's had a 75 as a company car and then had it replaced who is happy with the replacement. Just across four people the replacements were an IS200 Lexus, X-Type Jag, Mondeo and Laguna and they all want the 75 back.

The big problem it's always had is that the market it was really playing in didn't dare buy it. It was always against the Mondeo/Vectra/Laguna in the fleet market and those people are never going to buy from a potentially insecure company.

P.

IIRC the chinese company who's name I can't recall have already bought the engine-related parts of Rover, basically the decent parts of Rover have been removed leaving just the shit cars.

The UK has a mass of small sports car manufacturers like Westfield, Caterham, Noble, Ultima Sports and many many others, we just don't do mass-market cars very well. I can't think of a single decent car produced by Rover in recent years. We make the best performing and best value for money sports cars, it's the cruft that clogs the world that we don't do so well.

Our mass-market car industry's never really been viable as most of it came from the BL bucket of rot, and never really escaped from the rotten management that involved. So many decent car manufacturers disappeared down that hole, previous to that we made excellent cars and exported them around the world, but the rest of the world caught up and overtook BL while the old boy network twiddled their thumbs.

As for the rest of our government-owned industries, successive governments have sold off as much as they can to industry and then bailed them out with masses of our cash, getting less and less in return, it's pathetic. The politicians rarely refer to us as anything other than "consumers" (a pet hate of mine) emphasising their view of the country as a pool of cash to be shifted around from wallet to wallet.

Us citizens meanwhile bicker amongst ourselves about 4x4s, yob culture, religious bigotry, rants about travellers and so on. All totally irrelevant.

I don't expect it's much different elsewhere, best thing to do is just to ignore the mayhem and plough your own furrow, something I think that people in this group can do better than many.

Well it all comes down to badge engineering. BMW has the Rover Trademark anyway.

It reminds me of the attempts to preserve the Triumph Motorcycle company at Meriden back in the seventies. It was a noble effort, but ultimatly it was just a name.

What is motoring heritage, it is more than a name,

It is the continous improvement of models drawing from the same engineering heritage.

For all I do not like defenders you can see there heritage, likewise with Ford owned Jaguars even, but Rovers no way.