historyofcoventrycars

Rover Company

Successor Rover Group
Founded 1904
Defunct 1986
Location Coventry, West Midlands
Solihull, West Midlands
Industry Automotive
Key people John Kemp Starley & William Sutton (Founders)
Former Parent Leyland Motor Corporation
British Leyland Motor Corporation
The Rover Company was a British motor vehicle manufacturing company originating in Coventry, which moved to Solihull after World War II. Following absorption by Leyland Motors in 1967, and subsequent mergers, the Rover Company retained its identity as a subsidiary of British Leyland through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The Rover marque survived the break-up of British Leyland, and sell-off into private ownership, being used as the primary brand of the Rover Group as it passed, first through the hands of British Aerospace, and then into the ownership of BMW. In 2000 BMW sold much of the mass-market car activities of the Rover Group to the Phoenix Consortium who established it as the MG Rover Group. However, BMW retained ownership of the Rover brand, allowing MG Rover to use it under licence. In April 2005 Rover branded cars ceased to be produced when MG Rover became insolvent. In July 2005 the Nanjing Automobile Group acquired the physical assets and tooling of MG Rover, although SAIC already owned certain intellectual property, with plans to resume production of MG Rover car designs in China and at Longbridge, in 2007. On September 18, 2006 BMW sold the Rover brand name to the Ford Motor Company for approximately £6 million. Ford wanted it in order to protect their Land Rover brand.[1] Ford had acquired an option of first refusal to buy the Rover brand as a result of its purchase of Land Rover from BMW in 2000. In March 2008, Ford reached agreement with Tata Motors of India to include the Rover brand as part of the sale of their Jaguar Land Rover operations to them.
History
Before cars
The first Rover was a tricycle manufactured by Starley & Sutton Co. of Coventry, England in 1883. The company was founded by John Kemp Starley and William Sutton in 1878. Starley had formerly worked with his uncle James Starley (father of the cycle trade) who began in manufacturing sewing machines and switched to bicycles in 1869.

In the early 1880s the cycles available were the relatively dangerous penny-farthings and high-wheel tricycles. J. K. Starley made history in 1885 by producing the Rover Safety Bicycle—a rear-wheel-drive, chain-driven cycle with two similar-sized wheels, making it more stable than the previous high wheeled designs. Cycling Magazine said the Rover had 'set the pattern to the world' and the phrase was used in their advertising for many years. Starley's Rover is usually described by historians as the first recognisably modern bicycle. The words for "bicycle" in Polish (Rower) and Belarusian (Rovar, Ро́вар) are derived from the name of this company.

Early Rover cars
Rover 1905In 1888 Starley made an electric car, but it never was put into production.

The Rover Six in a 1910 advertisement—£155
Rover Tourer 1926
1936 Rover 10In 1889 the company became J. K. Starley & Co. Ltd and in the late 1890s, the Rover Cycle Company Ltd. Three years after Starley's death in 1901, the Rover company began producing automobiles with the two-seater Rover Eight to the designs of Edmund Lewis who came from Daimler. During the First World War they made motorcycles, lorries to Maudslay designs and not having a suitable one of their own, cars to a Sunbeam design. Bicycle and motorcycle production continued until the Great Depression forced the end of production in 1925. The business was not very successful during the 1920s and did not pay a dividend from 1923 until the mid 1930s. In 1929 when there was a change of management with Spencer Wilks coming in from Hillman as general manager. He set about reorganising the company and moving it up market to cater for people who wanted something "superior" to Fords and Austins. He was joined by his brother Maurice, who had also been at Hillman, as chief engineer in 1930. Spencer Wilks stayed with the company until 1962 and his brother until 1963.

World War II and gas turbines
In the late 1930s, in anticipation of potential hostilities which would become World War II, the British government started a re-armament programme and as part of this "Shadow Factories" were built. These were paid for by the government but staffed and run by private companies. Two were run by Rover, one at Acocks Green, Birmingham started operation in 1937 and a second larger one at Solihull started in 1940. Both were employed making aero engines and airframes. The original main works at Helen Street, Coventry was severely damaged by bombing in 1940 and 1941 and never regained full production.

In early 1940 Rover were approached by the government to support Frank Whittle in developing the gas turbine engine. Whittle's company, Power Jets had no production facilities and the intention was for Rover to take the design and develop it for mass production. Whittle himself was not pleased by this and did not like design changes made without his approval but the first test engines to the W2B design were built in a disused cotton mill in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, in October 1941. Rolls-Royce took an interest in the new technology and an agreement was reached in 1942 that they would take over the engines and Barnoldswick works and in exchange Rover would get the contract for making Meteor tank engines which actually continued until 1964.

After the Second World War, the company abandoned Helen Street and bought the two Shadow Factories. Acocks Green carried on for a while making Meteor engines for tanks and Solihull became the new centre for vehicles with production resuming in 1947 and would become the home of the Land Rover.

Experimental cars

Rover gas turbine experimental carIn 1950, designer F. R. Bell and Chief Engineer Maurice Wilks unveiled the first car powered with a gas turbine engine. The two-seater JET1 had the engine positioned behind the seats, air intake grilles on either side of the car and exhaust outlets on the top of the tail. During tests, the car reached top speeds of 88 mph (140 km/h), at a turbine speed of 50,000 rpm. The car ran on petrol, paraffin or diesel oil, but fuel consumption problems proved insurmountable for a production car. It is currently on display at the London Science Museum. Rover and the BRM Formula One team joined forces to produce a gas turbine powered coupe, which entered the 1963 24 hours of Le Mans, driven by Graham Hill and Richie Ginther. It averaged 107.8 mph (173 km/h) and had a top speed of 142 mph (229 km/h).

Golden years

1962 Rover 80 (P4)The 1950s and '60s were fruitful years for the company, with the Land Rover becoming a runaway success (despite Rover's reputation for making up-market saloons, the utilitarian Land Rover was actually the company's biggest seller throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s), as well as the P5 and P6 saloons equipped with a 3.5L (215ci) aluminium V8, the design and tooling of which was purchased from Buick, and pioneering research into gas turbine fuelled vehicles.

Rover 2000 (P6)
Mergers to form British Leyland
Main article: British Leyland
In 1967, Rover became part of the Leyland Motor Corporation (LMC), which already owned Triumph. The next year, LMC merged with the British Motor Holdings (BMH) to become the British Leyland Motor Corporation this was the beginning of the end for the independent Rover Company, as the Solihull based company's heritage drowned beneath the infamous industrial relations and managerial problems that beset the British motor industry throughout the 1970s. At various times it was part of the Specialist Division (hence the factory designation SD1 for the first—and in the event, only—model produced under this arrangement), Rover-Triumph, and Jaguar Rover Triumph.

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 cars (albeit possibly inspired by the earlier Jeep Wagoneer and IH Bronco) to combine off-road ability and comfortable versatility. Powered by the ex-Buick V8 engine, it had innovative features such as a permanent 4 wheel drive system, all-coil spring suspension and disc brakes on all wheels. Able to reach speeds of up to 100 mph, yet also capable of extreme off-road use, the original Range Rover design was to remain in production for the next 26 years.

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

1985 Rover Vitesse (SD1) (post-facelift)The Rover SD1 of 1976 was an excellent car, but was beset with so many build quality and reliability issues that it never delivered its great promise. Following the closure of the Triumph factory at Canley production of the Triumph TR7 and Triumph TR8 was moved to Solihull but soon after a savage programme of cutbacks in the late 1970s led to the end of car production at the Solihull factory which was turned over for Land Rover production only. The TR7/8 model was discontinued while SD1 production moved to Cowley. All future Rover cars would be made in the former Austin and Morris plants in Longbridge and Cowley, respectively.

Rover and Honda
In 1979, British Leyland (or as it was now officially known, BL Ltd) began a long relationship with the Honda Motor Company of Japan. The result was a cross-holding structure where Honda took a 20 percent stake in the company while the company took a 20 percent stake in Honda's U.K. subsidiary. The deal was thought to be mutually beneficial: Honda used its British operations as a launchpad into Europe, and the company can pool resources with Honda in developing new cars.

Austin Rover Group was formed in 1982 as the mass-market car manufacturing subsidiary of BL, with the separate Rover Company becoming effectively defunct. In the 1980s, the slimmed-down BL used the Rover brand on a range of cars co-developed with Honda. The first Honda-sourced Rover model, released in 1984 was the Rover 200, which, like the Triumph Acclaim that it replaced, was based on the Honda Ballade. (Similarly, in Australia, the Honda Quint (known in Europe as the Quintet) and Integra were badged as the Rover Quintet and 416i.)

The Rover brand name lives on
Rover Group

1996 Rover 400By 1986, Austin Rover had moved to a one-marque strategy, using only the Rover brand, and its parent BL, was renamed as the Rover Group, with the car division becoming Rover Cars. In 1986, the Rover SD1 was replaced by the Rover 800, developed with the Honda Legend. The Austin range were now technically Rovers, though the word "Rover" never actually appeared on the badging — there was instead a badge similar to the Rover Viking shape, without wording. These were replaced by the Rover 400 and Rover 600, based on Honda's Concerto and Accord.

Rover exported Rover 800s, badged as Sterlings, to the United States from 1987 to 1992.

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