Where it all started to go wrong for Rover - Jehova's Witnesses

[forddeliveryboy]

I think the media had a role in BL/ARG/Rover demise. Not all the management and unions' faults. The old 'knock it if it's British' disease.

[Bren]

A lack of development cost rover.

 

 

Putting body kits on rovers and calling them MG's was not development.

 

 

However, there was never going to be any money for development considering the exceedingly generous renumeration packages the four directors took from the company.

[Pete-M]

BL was where it went wrong for Rover.

 

Jaguar always gave the impression that they'd been dragged into BL's doomed empire but that they wanted out and we're going to escape as soon as they could. Rightfully so, a Jaguar was never a car for the Communists. I love that Jaguar told BL the Rover V8 wouldn't fit the XJ40 and got away with it. BL's bull-buggeringly incompetent management didn't actually check, they just accepted that it wouldn't and that was that.

 

Land Rover kept a lot of the disaster that was BL going with bugger all investment. The Range Rover was starved of investment pretty much from launch. Designed mainly by Rover then starved of investment by BL.

 

Rover spent the early 70s going down dead ends - P76 etc, then suffered BL build quality on the SD1. If they'd built the SD1 to P6 standards Rover would have been a world beater. Haphazardly lobbing 2.0 SD1s together using the cheapest bits available was always gonna kill Rover.

 

The R8 didn't really feel like a Rover to me. They were ok but I consider them the last twitches of Rover's dying corpse. Jaguar bought themselves out of BL and survived the mess, Land Rover would have been better off never being involved.

 

BL should never have happened.

[Sigmund Fraud]

BL should never have happened.

 

Yes, but then this very forum wouldn't have a raison d'etre !

[forddeliveryboy]

Yes, but then this very forum wouldn't have a raison d'etre !

 

Yes, socialism in the motor industry is almost essential for autoshite. Ford being the exception which proves the rule, of course

 

 

Jaguar always gave the impression that they'd been dragged into BL's doomed empire but that they wanted out and we're going to escape as soon as they could. Rightfully so, a Jaguar was never a car for the Communists. I love that Jaguar told BL the Rover V8 wouldn't fit the XJ40 and got away with it. BL's bull-buggeringly incompetent management didn't actually check, they just accepted that it wouldn't and that was that.

 

 

I thought Jag deliberately made the 40 so the V8 wouldn't fit - which was why it took a bit of hammering to squeeze their own V into it, when someone thought guv mins needed something even more thirsty. Prob so the German Mercs didn't overtake them between the airport and EUHQ. (Meant as a joke but possibly dangerously close to the truth).

 

 

Land Rover kept a lot of the disaster that was BL going with bugger all investment. The Range Rover was starved of investment pretty much from launch. Designed mainly by Rover then starved of investment by BL.

 

Rover spent the early 70s going down dead ends - P76 etc, then suffered BL build quality on the SD1. If they'd built the SD1 to P6 standards Rover would have been a world beater. Haphazardly lobbing 2.0 SD1s together using the cheapest bits available was always gonna kill Rover.

 

BL should never have happened.

 

Range Rovers keeping BL afloat is socialism in practice - big, fuel-gobbling monsters for stately home owners funding the shite for the proles.

 

The SD1 should have been a runaway success, agreed. Amazing looks for a family saloon, back in the late seventies. Simple design underneath which worked perfectly ok. But it was only available in yellow, wasn't it?

 

Yep, BL should never have happened. It allowed everyone to pass the buck, everyone argued and lost direction and the blue plug logo symbolised everything which wasn't working in 70s Britain. Triumph alone was a huge success, pre-BL. Spitfires, 2000s, 1300, 1500, Vitesse, Herald. All killed stone dead. Was this just moustachist?

[Pete-M]

The world would be a better place though. No Marina, Allegro, Princess, Ambassador, Acclaim, MGB (after 68), no Stag V8 or K series. No Mini Clubman. No Marina door handles.

 

Imagine life without all of those. Being able to look back at various British car companies and not cringing at the hideous monstrosities BL created to make British engineering look utterly shit around the world.

 

Autoshite would be all about Audis.

[saucedoctor]

The world would be a better place though. No Marina, Allegro, Princess, Ambassador, Acclaim, MGB (after 68), no Stag V8 or K series. No Mini Clubman. No Marina door handles.

Imagine life without all of those. Being able to look back at various British car companies and not cringing at the hideous monstrosities BL created to make British engineering look utterly shit around the world.

Autoshite would be all about Audis.

HERETIC! The K Series is a superb engine. Mrs. Thatcher thought so too.

[Pete-M]

I thought Jag deliberately made the 40 so the V8 wouldn't fit

When Ford went to fit the V12 in the late XJ40 the engineers realised there was plenty of room to get the Rover V8 in, but to fit the Jag V12 the underbonnet area needed a fair bit of fettling to squeeze the V12 in. Mainly because it's huge.

[forddeliveryboy]

Yep, I tend to rely on what I read in CAR back in the 80s! It's priceless that the v8 did fit under the 40's bonnet. 

 

K-series is a good unit, if it hadn't been for the cooling system issues (easily remedied) it would have had a good name. Why couldn't they sort it out fast? Hole in the thermostat would have been a good start. Cost? Nil.

 

I always thought the Princess (and Ambassador) were fine cars, for the purpose.

 

 

Life would be all about Audis

 

Triumph looked set to make the most sense. The replacement for the 2000/2500 looked good and the marque had a BMW-style appeal, lacking Rover's fusty 'bank manager' or 'poor man's Rolls' image. Better medium-sized engines than the other BL entrants, in many repsects. But all the Midlands makers would have to have taken lessons in gearboxes from Ford - they were often iffy in some respect or other.

[saucedoctor]

The Mundy V12 is a bloody monster. Even in an XJ-S, it's a right bastard to work on in places. Rover V8 goes in an XJ40 no bother. A guy round here did it years ago for the hell of it (and lobbed the AJ6 in an SD1 for the Aghadowey Demolition Derby).

[dugong]

Er. didn't Walter Hassan do the Jaguar V12?

[TRW]

Autoshite would be all about Audis

 

 

Kill me now. Seriously, if that ever happens just kill me.

[TRW]

Hey Audishiters. I spent the day bombing around in my Audi, on the phone with fog lights on whilst tailgating a Rover. Just for fun.

 

Oh yeah, my TDSI Audi is better than yours.

 

Bye.

[red5]

The original brief for the 75 was RWD....

[saucedoctor]

Er. didn't Walter Hassan do the Jaguar V12?

Yep. He, Mundy and Bill Heynes did the V12 Jaaaag. They had all worked together at Coventry Climax IIRC.

[scruff]

BL was where it went wrong for Rover.

 

Jaguar always gave the impression that they'd been dragged into BL's doomed empire but that they wanted out and we're going to escape as soon as they could. Rightfully so, a Jaguar was never a car for the Communists. I love that Jaguar told BL the Rover V8 wouldn't fit the XJ40 and got away with it. BL's bull-buggeringly incompetent management didn't actually check, they just accepted that it wouldn't and that was that.

 

Land Rover kept a lot of the disaster that was BL going with bugger all investment. The Range Rover was starved of investment pretty much from launch. Designed mainly by Rover then starved of investment by BL.

 

Rover spent the early 70s going down dead ends - P76 etc, then suffered BL build quality on the SD1. If they'd built the SD1 to P6 standards Rover would have been a world beater. Haphazardly lobbing 2.0 SD1s together using the cheapest bits available was always gonna kill Rover.

 

The R8 didn't really feel like a Rover to me. They were ok but I consider them the last twitches of Rover's dying corpse. Jaguar bought themselves out of BL and survived the mess, Land Rover would have been better off never being involved.

 

BL should never have happened.

 

Good post.

Imagine if R8s had been badged Austins... after all they came down the line at Longbridge, and IIRC even Rover Group parked a A40 Somerset next to one for some publicity photos. 

 

What I find interesting is that Land Rovers of today are almost running true to the old Rover values, big quality luxury motors, ignore the 4x4 bit as the majority of customers do and all a Disco or a Sport is, is a big posh car. A Rover car.

 

It's a shame that in all probability we will never see another Rover produced. JLR have all the rights to the name though, maybe one day? 

[petr]

I live near Hessle and bought a new Rover R8 214 it looked nice did not keep it long as it did not seem like a car that would last. Also the longer I had it the more I disliked it. Then back last 2011 I bought a hondarover R8 216 cab for 300 pounds It was so good to drive in conparison as an old cheep shiter it drove so well. I wish I had keept it as they seem to be geting a lot more pricey. I think Rover was best when it had the tie up with Honda. BAE in true Bae style sold just when they should not havr and to the wrong company.

 

Sent from my GT-S6810P using Tapatalk

[RichardMoss]

Actually, it could all stem back to the days when Nutty Alec was allowed to run wild in the design department and we got given the cars that HE wanted rather than the cars that the PUBLIC wanted (the only real exception being the ADO16 range which sold like hot cakes year on year).  The Mini bloody nearly killed BMC

[forddeliveryboy]

Actually, it could all stem back to the days when Nutty Alec was allowed to run wild in the design department and we got given the cars that HE wanted rather than the cars that the PUBLIC wanted (the only real exception being the ADO16 range which sold like hot cakes year on year).  The Mini bloody nearly killed BMC

 

Shouldn't they have just costed it better? Otherwise it sounds like you're arguing for cheap engineering just so that a manufacturer makes more money? I think Citroen made little money on 2cv sales, but it brought people into the fold and they often stayed. I know my local bank chap says Head Office tits want to get rid of counter service altogether because it's a loss leader.

[RichardMoss]

From reading Graham Robson's book on the Mini, it seems like they never really costed it at all and most years they actually lost money on them. The only real advantage was economies of scale - sharing quite a lot of components with other cars reduced the unit cost for all - so sales of the Mini did make the ADO16 cheaper to build. But why no big estate cars (Landcrab estate)? Why build the Austin 3L? Why no hatchback for the Allegro and Princess?

 

Pisspoor market research, that's why!

 

Lack of platform sharing was also an issue - at one point in the 1970s BL had the B series, O series, E series and Triumph slant 4 all covering the 1700-1850cc range at the same time which is just nutty. Add the A series, E6 2200, Triumph 4 and 6 cylinder (1.3 to 2.5), Rover V8, Stag V8 (TWO V8s?), Landrover 4 and 6 cylinder and it all gets very silly before you even start on transmissions, suspension etc. They could have done up to 1300cc with the A series and then 1500cc to 3000cc with O series 4 and 6 cylinder units. A 3L O6 powered SD1 would (probably) have been great!

 

At the same time, Ford covered the whole of its UK range with the Kent, Pinto and Essex units - with the only real area of possible overlap being around 2L with the Pinto and V4.

 

It wasn't much better later - pre1996 the R8 was fitted with 4 different engines: 1.4 K4, 1.6 D16, 1.8 XUD and 2.0 M series (later T series). Each had a different transmission, too!

[CortinaDave]

Said it before on here but. - the sad thing is the late MG Rovers are actually really decent cars. Amazes me how many of them I see on a daily basis given they've been dead 9 years. They seem to be hardy,long lived machines.

[rml2345]

BMC is what killed Rover because they never bothered to cost things. They designed and built a car before deciding what it would sell for, rather than charge what it cost them to make plus a bit on top. The Mini lost money, ADO16 barely covered costs and the other Issigonis cars were nowhere.

The successful Leyland motors already had Rover and Triumph and they were making money. Leyland had planned to push Rover as a Jag competitor, leaving Triumph to serve the young sporty exec type market. They turned down BMC as they could see it was a dead duck but the government pushed for a merger and sealed the fate of a large slice of our vehicle manufacturing industry. The resulting BLMC combine was a vast sprawling mess which needed quick consolidation that didn't happen due to management hopelessness and militant workforce.

From that point on, Rover was pretty much doomed.

[Junkman]

Don't blame me, I stay true to Rover, despite mine is haunted.

[messerschmitt owner]

After Junkman's posessed P6 was made, from that point on, Rover was pretty much doomed.

EFA

[forddeliveryboy]

From reading Graham Robson's book on the Mini, it seems like they never really costed it at all and most years they actually lost money on them. The only real advantage was economies of scale - sharing quite a lot of components with other cars reduced the unit cost for all - so sales of the Mini did make the ADO16 cheaper to build. But why no big estate cars (Landcrab estate)? Why build the Austin 3L? Why no hatchback for the Allegro and Princess?

 

Pisspoor market research, that's why!

 

Lack of platform sharing was also an issue - at one point in the 1970s BL had the B series, O series, E series and Triumph slant 4 all covering the 1700-1850cc range at the same time which is just nutty. Add the A series, E6 2200, Triumph 4 and 6 cylinder (1.3 to 2.5), Rover V8, Stag V8 (TWO V8s?), Landrover 4 and 6 cylinder and it all gets very silly before you even start on transmissions, suspension etc. They could have done up to 1300cc with the A series and then 1500cc to 3000cc with O series 4 and 6 cylinder units. A 3L O6 powered SD1 would (probably) have been great!

 

At the same time, Ford covered the whole of its UK range with the Kent, Pinto and Essex units - with the only real area of possible overlap being around 2L with the Pinto and V4.

 

It wasn't much better later - pre1996 the R8 was fitted with 4 different engines: 1.4 K4, 1.6 D16, 1.8 XUD and 2.0 M series (later T series). Each had a different transmission, too!

 

Isn't that why Leyland came to be in the first place - so many different makes all with similar sized, same layout engines and platforms? The outcome could have been much better had it been managed really well by someone who understood the industry from top to bottom, instead of high-flying managing executives with little appreciation for anything other than money and how to impress politicians.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

Not replacing the Montego,thinking they could move away from the fleet market and 'become the British BMW' which was bollocks often spouted by Rover execs before the BMW takeover.

In about 89/90 the company I worked for couldn't get enough R8s and the Montego was a popular choice against Sierras,Cavaliers and 405s because they were always a bit better equipped for the price- company car drivers would always go for equipment or trim level over anything else so if you could get a Montego SLX with sunroof and electric mirrors for the same price as a Cavalier L with keep fit windows and no PAS the box marked Montego would be ticked. The residuals were all pretty similar at 60,000 or 3 years.

Then some muppet decided to offer 620s with no equipment for the same price as a Carlton or BMW 318 and wondered why they didn't sell like Montegos.

The 75 was neither Mondeo or Omega in size so confused fleet managers and user choosers alike,however good a car it may have been it wasn't big enough to replace the 800.

As for the pantomime villain roll call Issigonis,Stokes,Robinson,Edwardes,Thatcher,Reitzle,Towers. How could any company survive that combination of ego,ambition,greed and muppetry?

[RichardMoss]

with regard t

The launching of  the weapons system in in the hands of the Captain, XO and  Cheif Engineer  of  her maj's black submarinable  war canoes  and in the hands of the the Pilot  and Nav  when he had air launched ... ( that is also why all RN and RAF pilots and navs  were officers -  where the AAC retains  NCO pilots - it never had air launched tac nukes)

I can neither confirm nor deny any of the items that I used to carry in my aeroplanes when in the RAF

[In The Pit]

Said it before on here but. - the sad thing is the late MG Rovers are actually really decent cars. Amazes me how many of them I see on a daily basis given they've been dead 9 years. They seem to be hardy,long lived machines.

Totally agree there are plenty of them where I live.  The oldest cars I see are either Rover, Peugeot or Ford they seem to outlast most of the other stuff round here.

[Guest Breadvan72]

IIRC, Rover was the biggest seller in the UK on the day it went bust.  

 

There are as many stories about the demise of BL and some of its constituent companies as there were BL models!

 

My dad had started on the shop floor at Joseph Lucas and worked his way up through the middle management in BL during the 1970s and was then recruited by Michael Edwardes to join a team of trouble shooters.  My dad worked in most divisions of BL, but never in Jaguar or Land Rover, although he did work at the Solihull factory on the SD1.  He is scathing about the management that he worked under for the most part, and curses the name of Lord Stokes.  My dad thinks that Michael Edwardes was a very good thing, but came in too late and was subject to too much interference from the Thatcher Government, with Secretaries of State trying to micro manage the car industry.  He knew and cordially despised Red Robbo  (my dad is himself an ardent Socialist and trade union man), but blames management more than unions for what happened. 

 

After Lucas (who had  paid for my dad to train up and leave the shop floor to put on a collar and tie), my dad had done a stint at Rootes-Chrysler.  He worked on the interior of the fastback Rapier amongst other projects.  When he first moved to Rover he thought "now at last I am moving from the mass market crap to the high end quality stuff".  He found that it was in effect the other way around.  

 

One of my dad's main themes is the worn machine tools and the lack of investment in new ones.  He recalls the surprise expressed by the Honda execs who came to visit when the tie in with Honda was happening, as Honda at that time was re tooling once a decade.  He told me a story the other day about watching a bloke fitting a component on a car (I think it was a Marina, but my memory is fuzzy as we were drinking Jameson's).  The machine tools that had made it were knackered and the fixing hole was in the wrong place.  The bloke used a factory bodge that was applied to every car  (involving a big spanner with a length of steel tubing jammed on to it rather than the special tool designed for the fixing).  The effect of the bodge would be that the component would be likely to break under stress.  The bloke shrugged when this was put to him by my dad.  He had been told just to get the cars ready for the dealers, whatever it took.

 

My dad is enthusiastic about the quality of much of the design and much of the engineering thinking behind the cars, but laments that the designs were often appallingly executed.  He laments also the lack of rationalisation of model ranges, the internecine competition and silliness, and the lack of development expenditure on the promising models.  He thinks that the Stag, the Princess and the SD1 could and should have been World beaters, but were all cocked up.    He deplores the Marina and praises the Allegro and the Metro, although again the Allegro was cocked up and the Metro mucked around with.  He thinks that MG should have been retired early and Triumph ramped up as the sporty brand.   Jaguar he was aware of because they all sulked at group meetings, and it was well known that they just wanted to escape and until they could escape would not play ball.    The Rover vs Triumph farrago about the V8 he recalls well.

 

His company cars included a good Princess, a  bad Metro, briefly an SD1 that was ace about three days out of seven and broken the rest, and a good Montego, which he kept after he was eventually made redundant (and immediately rehired as a consultant to do the same job for more money) .  He ended up in charge of a factory making exhausts for Unipart.  He was amazed by the huge over production of spares by Unipart.  We benefit from this now as there are still racks of boxes of original stuff in sheds. 

 

Rover nonetheless went on to produce some good if slightly dull cars in its later years.  The blokes who bought Rover and ran it into insolvency were, my dad says, widely known in the industry to be dodgy,  As usual, Ministerial naivety was exploited by sharp suits.  The rest we know.

[Pete-M]

One of the reasons my dad closed his garage was when he had an order in 1980 for two mini automatics that had to have tinted glass, radios and metallic paint. There was a long waiting list for them and BL promised to deliver them for the beginning of April. In the middle of June the cars finally arrived - Apple Jack Green paint (non-metallic), clear glass, with the radio in a box and an incomplete set of tinted windows in boxes. One of the minis had a list of jobs that needed doing before PDI taped to the steering wheel.

 

As my poor old dad had waited for months for two metallic Green automatic minis and finally received kit form ones in the wrong colour He finally threw the towel in. Almost every BL car he'd sold over the last year had been delivered incomplete or to the wrong spec, and BL simply weren't sending the bits to fix them.