Rover (marque)

Rover is a British automotive brand that was used for over a century, from 1904 to 2005. It was launched as a bicycle maker called Rover Company in 1878, before starting to manufacture autocars in 1904. The marque used the Viking longship as its logo. The rights to the trademark are currently held by Jaguar Land Rover, which continues to produce Land Rovers, but no Rover automobiles are currently in production and the brand is considered dormant.

Despite being first absorbed by the Leyland Motor Corporation (LMC) in 1966 and a subsequent succession of mergers, nationalisation, and demergers, the Rover marque retained its identity – first as an independent subsidiary division of LMC, and subsequently through various groups within British Leyland (BL) through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

The Rover brand then became the flagship marque of the newly and eponymously renamed Rover Group in 1988, which included the actually stronger and more valuable trademarks Land Rover and Mini as it passed first through the hands of British Aerospace and then into the ownership of BMW Group. Sharing technology with Honda and financial investment during the BMW ownership led to a revival of the brand during the 1990s in its core midsize car segment.

In 2000, BMW sold Rover and related MG car activities of the Rover Group to the Phoenix Consortium, who established the MG Rover Group at Longbridge. BMW retained ownership of the Rover trademark, allowing MG Rover to use it under licence. In April 2005, Rover-badged cars ceased to be produced when the MG Rover Group became insolvent. The MG Rover Group's assets then got split up between two Chinese automakers – some were bought by SAIC Motor, who obtained technology that was incorporated into a new Chinese line of Roewe branded luxury saloons. Other assets were bought by Nanjing Automobile, which subsequently became a subsidiary of SAIC Motor in 2007.

BMW sold the rights to the Rover trademark to Ford in 2006 for approximately £6 million, the latter exercising an option of first refusal to buy it dating back to its purchase of Land Rover in 2000. Ford thus reunited the original Rover Company marques, primarily for brand-protection reasons. In March 2008, Ford reached agreement with Tata Motors of India to include the Rover trademark as part of the sale of their Jaguar Land Rover operations to them. Legally the Rover brand is the property of Land Rover under the terms of Ford's purchase of the name in 2006.

In 1970, Rover combined its skill in producing comfortable saloons and the rugged Land Rover 4x4 to produce the Range Rover, one of the first vehicles (preceded by the Jeep Wagoneer and International Scout) to combine off-road ability and comfortable versatility. Powered by the licence-built ex-Buick V8 engine, it had innovative features such as a permanent four-wheel drive system, all-coil spring suspension, and disc brakes on all wheels. Able to reach speeds of up to 100 mph (160 km/h) yet also capable of extreme off-road use, the original Range Rover design remained in production for the next 26 years.

The company's other major project at this time was the P8, a successor, styled by David Bache, for the 3-litre. The car's shape owed much to Detroit, with a front bumper concealed under a "bumperless" polyurethane nose, in a manner reminiscent of contemporary Pontiacs, and a side profile reminiscent of a slightly chunkier Opel Rekord. Although the original brief was for the car to be no longer externally than a Rover 2000, management changes led the project to be redefined as it progressed, and the P8 scheduled for launch at the 1971 London Motor Show was substantially larger than any existing Rover sedan, with the Rover V8 engine expanded for this application to 4.4 litres. The car followed the P6 in employing a steel frame structure with bolt-on steel or aluminium panels. The manufacturer was nevertheless short of cash and focus at this time: the P8 was one of several new model projects subjected to a slipping time-line. By the revised launch date towards the end of 1972 the considerable development costs had been expended and pre-production prototypes had even undergone extensive testing in Finland. Production capacity had been set aside for the P8 at the Solihull plant. However, an expenditure review in 1970 found the project subjected to criticism from Sir William Lyons, by now an influential member of the British Leyland board: speculation has arisen that Lyons saw the car as a threat to future investment in the recently launched Jaguar XJ6. It later emerged that Rover's contender would not have been particularly cheap or easy to build, and the shrinkage of the European market for sedans of this size that followed the 1973 oil price shock suggest that abandonment of the project in 1972 – even at the eleventh hour – may have been the right decision for British Leyland; but the P8 was not entirely ummourned nearly thirty years later. Some of the P8's styling cues turned up two years later on the Leyland P76, and the driver's view of the instrument panel (albeit without the Austin Allegro style "quartic" steering wheel that appears in one of the surviving pictures of it) would have been not entirely unfamiliar to the driver of a 1976 Rover 3500.

As British Leyland struggled through financial turmoil and an industrial-relations crisis during the 1970s, it was effectively nationalised after a multibillion-pound government cash injection in 1975. Michael Edwardes was brought in to head the company.