Red Rover, Red Rover

[Dave@Moon]

Another great automotive name has passed from us this month. Rover/MG went belly-up last Tuesday (red Rover, get it?) after a Chinese buyout plan (red Rover, get it?) failed. Production has shut down and the process of inventory sell-off has begun.

Rover does not own the rights to it's own name, which is owned by BMW. I believe they <span style="font-style: italic">do</span> own the rights to the MG, Austin-Healey and Triumph names, however. If not then any limitations to their sale by former parent BMW are probably at an end. Perhaps someone may buy those names now and resurrect them.

Those of you who are in the "little British car" end of our hobbiest gene pool may be effected as well. For one thing it's a good bet that any Rover-group based parts sources are about to dry up fast!

What amazes me is that I didn't hear a peep about this until yesterday when I saw a cartoon about it on the <span style="font-style: italic">Autoweek</span> funny page. I hope our hobby has more say about this loss than I've seen so far.

[6219_Rules]

Dave, I doubt anyone really cares, outside the hobby. And there have been many stories that I have not seen until accidentally switching on BBC America News. Oh my! There IS a world out there! <img src="http://www.aaca.org/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

I wonder what BMW is going to do with MG in England? I cannot imagine Rover no longer being made.

But what the hell...times are changing. In retrospect I doubt it will mean any more than Nash swallowing Hudson before the end. <img src="http://www.aaca.org/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Its called Progress!

[Twitch]

If the Chinese would have bought it I hear they were going to call it the "Lover."

It doesn't seem long ago that Rover was running their quaint old-bodied sedans in rallies and sedan competitions though....

[Terry Bond]

Absolute bummer. Ive had the pleasure of getting close to some of the more recent production MGs. We have a number of Nato personnel stationed in the Norfolk area and have periodically had folks from the UK assigned here who had temporarily brought them into the country to use. Of course they have to go back home again, but those were some pretty neat cars. Would have loved to seen them come into the USA for sale but govt regulation precluded it. Those MGs are going to be instant collectors items and its a darned shame we cant get our hands on them.

Terry

[Jonathan Miller]

BMW put Rover up for sale in, iirc, 1998. There were 2 bidders who had differing ideas about what to do. One group wanted to scale the operation down and concentrate on the MG brand. The other group wanted to plough on building Rovers and MGs. The latter won because good old Tony Blair didn't want 4,500 people to lose their jobs (out of a total of c. 5,500).

They bought it for £10 , lined their own pockets, invested nothing in new product development, embarked on mind-boggling race programs, and now 5,500 people are out of work.

It's a sorry state of affairs as the last british owned major car manufacturer (as opposed to british built) is no more.

On the subject of parts supply for MGs in particular, I think that there's little to worry about, my stateside bretheren, as there is a fantastic network of parts manufacturers still.