OMG, another old marque shanghaied.

I’m also very sad to of seen the end of MG-Rover with some British Marques with it, who to blame for the demise, I’m not sure,half a dozen of one and six of the other, I think the labour government of the seventies tried to keep it going by nationalising what was BMC, but failed miserably either due to bad management or (more than likely) rebellious unions, that when Maggie got in all she wanted was to wash here hands of BL and asked Airospace to keep it for 5 years and didn’t care what they did with it afterwards
in 1995ish years after owning BL (it became known as British leyland by then) British Airospace sold the lot to BMW for £800K, sadly Honda had a 20% holding in BL and wanted to keep this investment in BL, but didn’t want to buy out BL. when BMW took over Honda sold its holding
I have got to hand it to BMW in the beginning they tried to make a go of BL but they saw the light and by 2000 once they copied the IP of Land Rover for their X5, they had sold off Land Rove jaguar to Fords for £2B and what was left of BL sold it for £10.00 (thats ten pounds) to the gang of four, Phenix, who’s first directive was to take out £40 million, £10M each for their pension, then just after 4 years MG-Rover went belly up and the Chinese bought what was left of this great motor company for £50,000 and striped most of the factory and shipped it all to China
I went on a factory tour a few years back, it truly was a sad day, out of a massive car manufacturing company, they’re were (if I remember correctly) 4 buildings standing, we went in to what was the main part of the car factory, and what I saw put tears in my eyes.
this massive car factory had turned in to a factory employing 24 people, to make cars, there was one very long conveyer with cars hanging from it all covered over in dust sheets, the whole time I was in this area I didn’t see any movement of these cars. then on another area there were a few guys fiddling round one car.
turns out what happens is, the completed cars arrive from China in two pallets, one pallet contains the complete engine and drive train, the other pallet contains the complete car minus the drive train.
the workers job is to fit the drive train to the car, and put wheels on the car job done, one of the guys with us on the tour asked what % of the car was British and what % what Chinese, we were told it was 20% British and 80% Chinese, when he asked further, and asked what were these 20% British parts, we were told British parts for the car were the four tyres and wheels, and the oil’s and coolant.
at the time I was there they were putting together between 3 and 15 cars a week, depending on demand
this is a very short version, I’ve missed lots out.but more or less this is what happened, people forget that in the late 60’s BMW ended up very near bust, they had to sell off the bike division and just about made it through, and also that in the early 70’s VW more or less went bust too and if not for the Golf in 1974/5 VW would of been toast
when BL nearly went bust our government helped it along and ended up selling it for £50K what a sad ending
(these are how I saw it, so others might see it differently)
in passing my farther bought two new BMC car's in his time and we (my wife and I) bought 2 new Rovers. one was a Rover 25 and the other was a MG TF in 2004, the year before MG Rover went belly up, still lots of Rover's/MG Rovers on the roads but sadly worth next to nothing, if the MG TF in the clip had just scratched its bumper the insurance would write it off as not being cost effective to repair