Last year sales of Rover cars fell by 23%, and MG Rover, Britain's last independent volume car maker posted a loss, the third in as many years, of £77m. Today, it appears that only foreign capital, from the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, might save the ailing Birmingham company.
It is quite possible that soon we will go no more a-Rovering up and down our broad, sunlit A-roads and in and out of National Trust car parks. The cars with the Victorian dog's name and Viking longship badge adorning their grilles, which first turned a wheel in 1904, may be seen, if at all, in future Shanghai and Beijing traffic jams. But, as China is busy making deals with the mighty General Motors and Volkswagen empires, there is no guarantee of success for MG Rover's long and awkward march into China.
None of these setbacks, however, discouraged MG Rover's four venture capitalist directors from pumping £3.6m into their pension fund last year, nor from receiving £2.5m each as part of the loan note they awarded themselves six months after their company, Phoenix Venture Holdings, bought beleaguered MG Rover from BMW for just £10 in May 2000. The highest paid of these David Brent-lookalike directors paid himself a salary of £817,486 last year. How would these stirling British businessmen have rewarded themselves if they had been running a successful European car company like BMW?
Given the current range of Rover cars - a garage of glum, pear-drop or carriage-clock shaped machines that compare very poorly in terms of design and pleasure with the products of any rival European rival - the only way of encouraging UK sales would be to cut prices by half. Management appears to be more interested in feathering its own nest than in design, engineering and manufacturing. This is, of course, a peculiarly British disease. The making of things, except money, is considered grubby and low. Try telling that to the engineering-obsessed directors of BMW, a company that has matured from making thrifty bubble cars to road-going Valkyries with mass-market appeal over the past 50 years while increasing its appeal to motoring buffs worldwide.
The money we invest in pension funds in Britain today would be much better spent on research and development in our belittled manufacturing industry. Rovers, however, might fly. All this seems doubly sad given that the name Rover was once synonymous with enduring engineering quality and innovation.
Who, looking at the current range of Rover cars, would think that this was once the pioneer of jet-propelled, or gas-turbine, cars, including the Dan Dare-style Jet 1 of 1950, or the sleek Rover-BRM Le Mans racer of 1965? How could anyone today believe that Rover once offered real competition to BMW, Citroen and Jaguar as it did with the launch of its P6 2000 model of 1963, styled brilliantly by David Bache? Who remembers British prime ministers riding from Downing Street in those imperious Rover P5s of the 1960s, one of which played a starring Jekyll and Hyde role in Basil Dearden's The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), a cult psycho-horror flick starring Roger Moore. It would be impossible to imagine a remake with Jude Law driving a lacklustre new Rover 75.
Rover had, in fact, innovated from the beginning, its engineering and design achievements becoming cinematic in scope. John Kemp Starley, a Coventry cycle mechanic in business with William Sutton, launched his revolutionary Rover Safety bicycle in 1885. Pretty much every cycle ever since owes its pedigree to Starley's. It trumped the Penny Farthing and, equipped with pneumatic tyres from 1888, broke every record going.
During the second world war, Rover worked with Frank Whittle on the development of the jet engine. It is hard to imagine today's pension fund-driven MG Rover acting as a springboard for the next leap in aerospace technology.
The Land Rover, a British Jeep endorsed by Winston Churchill, appeared in 1948, the equally brilliant Range Rover in 1970. A prototype E-type-eating sports car, the fabulous P6BS wowed the motoring press in the mid-1960s, a lightweight Buick V8 engine shoehorned beneath the bonnets of P5s and P6s gave Rover saloons road-burning clout, while in 1976 Rover produced the Ferrari Daytona-lookalike SD1 saloon, a potential world-beater if it hadn't been for the fall in manufacturing standards synonymous with British Leyland, which had swallowed Rover in 1968.
If you find cars a bad thing, and engineering in general a bore, and long for the day when we concentrate solely on making money rather than anything more substantial, the decline and fall of our last car giant may well be a cause for celebration. You might, though, be just a little sad to look on as the invention, ingenuity, design and manufacturing skills that once gave us the Rover Safety cycle as well as the motorway-era Rover 2000 are finally ousted in favour of an unalloyed executive pension-fund culture every bit as desirable and inspiring as a Rover 25.
jonathan.glancey@theguardian.com
