Could This Of Saved Rover

[philshelton]

the only one ever made rover scout

[Guest axle man again]

I doubt this would have saved Rover! It looks like it is a rejigged Metro/Rover 100. Where is this located?

 

Paul

Edited February 15, 2009 by axle man again

[philshelton]

I doubt this would have saved Rover! It looks like it is a rejigged Metro/Rover 100. Where is this located?

 

Paul

stondon transport museum

[Guest gdc]

]its not a bad looking car though better that others of the era .

[Guest gdc]

sorry to post twice in a row but .

there was also a desotto there , there are only 2 in the world of this type of car

in yellow looked brill , i spoke to one of the guys at the place and the whole collection is insured for 4.5 mill .

the dessoto would make 2.5 at auction in my humble opinion.

 

graham

[Guest TerryBarry]

Metro with distinct "Discovery" rear end - are we sure our Richard didn't have a hand in this

[Longboarder]

Isn't this sort of cobbled together parts bin special more the sort of thing that failing British car makers do in their death throes and is more part of why they die rather than a possible saviour.

 

Nigel

[Guest Stuartl]

Isn't this sort of cobbled together parts bin special more the sort of thing that failing British car makers do in their death throes and is more part of why they die rather than a possible saviour.

 

Nigel

 

Rover were always doing the 'parts bin special' cars, well for at least the last 25 years anyway.

 

It used to amuse me that my old Maestro van shared rear lights with a Discovery and column switch gear with one of my customer's £40k Range Rover Vogue!

 

Even the revamped MG company didnt learn, simply taking age old Rover models and slightly tweaking the front and rear bumpers and having the cheek to slap the once iconic octagonal MG badge on them.

 

Old cars for old people in my opinion.

 

Old people with money to pay mechanics I should add.

[ibrooks]

The disco was a serious parts bin special - almost as much as my old Scimitar but it kept within the Rover family (sort of). The rear lights were indeed from the Maestro van. The door-handles were from the Marina. The framework of the body was from the Range-Rover as was a large portion of the chassis and of course running gear. Headlights were again Maestro van (the diesel ones - petrol were different). Switch-gear was fairly common across the range at the time. Over the years it has been face-lifted and tweaked and the current Disco bears very little resemblance to the original (even the last ones produced before Land-Rover was split off was a very different animal).

 

As for the first MG's under the Phoenix 4 - well they did the job by sparking interest without costing a huge amount and they are not bad cars. The K-series has head gasket problems but the really annoying thing is that it was easy to solve and they didn't. Result was a terrible reputation for the engine that it should never have deserved. From there it sort of went downhill because they simply didn't move with the times. Everyone knew the first of the MG ROvers were a stop-gap and forgave them for that but when nothing changed people simply lost patience.

 

Remember the inception of Top-Gear's reasonably priced car? it was one of the few that you could buy for under ten grand at the time (and even then it wasn't more than a few hundred quid short). But they weren't more than 6 months into the series when they announced that you could now get a Ford Focus for the same money that they had paid for their Liana. Rover's prices simply didn't drop in line with everyone elses and that was just the final nail in the coffin.

 

I could still rather fancy an MG ZT260 or an MG SV

 

Iain

[Guest Nigel Novice]

I'm afraid it was a lack of paying their bills that killed them, the company (KSR) I used to work for were they instigators of the receivers going in, owed in the region of a million, we made the pedals for them, I was actually working on a revised pedal ratio set for the V8 monster when the plug was pulled, we stopped supply until they paid the bill and they didn't hence the demise.

[Swan Jnr]

thats the oje i'd like the 4.6 ford v8 powered one. just my kind of thing. big daft v8 in an old mans car!

[richyb66]

The basic problem with the old MG Rover was that they pi55ed away valuable engineering budget on projects that would never make money e.g. the V8 engined 75's, a LWB 75 and the MG SV. These were just pet projects whose sole actual achievemet was to give the directors something nice to drive around in - the actual public sales figures were minisule.

 

The money would have been better spend on an MG TF replacement as the TF was selling well but was an old car and a decent cheap small car - a bit like what they tried to do with the re-badged Tata Indica, but that was too expensive and had a nasty feel to it because they used Indian spec materials for the interior trim rather than the dearer European spec stuff.

 

MGR was a pretty well a dead man walking from the time that BMW pulled out and took the one car that could have saved them - MINI, but then they were only ever in it for a new small car and LandRover's 4x4 expertise for the X5. The suprising thing for me was that BMW achieved nothing in terms of raising MGR's profile during their ownership which is something that they should have been more that capable of doing if they'd had the will to do so.