MG Rover steals the 2005 election stage. Politicians talk about the crisis in MG Rover, while Tony Blair unveils a £150m aid for Rover. You will also see an interview with John Towers commenting on MG Rover collapse.
Shockingly poor management led to underinvestment, a lack of urgency, bad strategic decisions in allocating limited funds into wrong platform development hence wrong models were brought to market, perennial unreliability and poor quality drove buyers to other (mainly foreign) brands - poor Rover was doomed from the start.
@@jonathanbywater2063 There was nothing left to save. Towers and co had sold off all of the company's assets - the rights to the car designs, the factory and the land it sat on, the parts business and the finance business. There was absolutely nothing left.
@Manwitharuinedface and they stole the mini name,still have nitemares about it- how could one of our greatest cars end up as a bmw..? incredilous, sickening ,bizarre. saw one th eother day with a union jack on the roof..? insulting
BMW saved the MINI. If they’d given it to Rover we’d have lost that as well. At least the MINI is still built in a Rover factory. So in a strange way. The MINI is the last remnants of Rover, not Chinese MG.
You could have had that if the Government had not interfered. There was plenty of money for redundancies when the Moulton Group wanted to take over to make MG Sports cars. Instead of that the Phoenix 4 got involved and the writing was on the wall.
Amazing really, we had no hesitation bailing out the banks for billions , yet a small proportion of that would have saved Rover. Yeah some of the cars had some problems, that were and are fixable, but in General they were decent cars. To compare them to chinese and russian cars is absolute nonsense. I have been in the motor industry for 28 years, and I worked for Rover Cars for three years, they needed some investment, and they would have survived and carried on to greater things. Shame on the Government of the day, they can add this failure to a long list of bad and reckless decisions. In short the company should have never been sold to BMW !!!
Agree all of that. But a rescue package would have cost peanuts compared to monies handed over to the EU or Foreign Aid. The truth is that the Government did not care. Imagine if this had been FIAT or Renault. There is no way their respective Governments would have let this happen.
There was nothing left to save. Towers and co had sold off all of the company's assets - the rights to the car designs, the factory and the land it sat on, the parts business and the finance business. There was absolutely nothing left.
The government did not give the money to the banks. I phoned up Northern Rock and they repaid 40% of the bailout after only 1 year! BMW put a lot of money into Rover and appear to have lost the proportion to save the Rover brand. It would have been a serious risk of hardworking taxpayers money.
@@iainmclaughlan1557 BMW took the chance to eliminate a competitor. Nothing more, the only reason they didn't wind it down themselves is that it may have been unpopular and hurt their UK car. sales. They also loaned Phoenix just enough money to last 5 years as the former owners of bankrupt companies can be pursued for losses up to 5 years after change of hands. They also kept anything that had any chance of making money. Wouldn't surprise me if they were in on it with Towers as he had previously worked for BMW
Rovers are the worst cars out there apart from russian and chinese vehicles. rot,headgaskets and shoddy build quality let them down which led to disaster. I dont care if anyone on here owns a rover and things im wrong. I know im right because Im in the car business and have been down the rover route once and never again.
