agw_01 said:
Thanks for the poll Dolph
Oh look, I wonder who that kind person was who voted them as being good.
Hmm, could you comment on both the cars and the company?
Ok, I'll give my thoughts.
The cars.
As has already been said, the biggest problem is how outdated some of the designs are, and the general build quality and reliability issues.
I've owned both a Rover and a Honda, and the difference, to be honest, is like night and day. This was brought home even harder every time I've taken out an MG ZS of some sort (which is, ultimately, a very similar car to my 5 door civic.)
I've driven a couple of new ZS 180's now, and you know it's bad when you get into a supposedly new car and it has more rattles, squeaks, dodgy construction and gaps than my Honda does after 100k. Then there's the fact that despite having a much bigger and thirstier engine, it's producing about the same power and not really any quicker. (A 180 will just outdrag the VTi down the quarter mile due to the VTi's crappy gear ratios, but real world there is nothing in it). To make things worse where the civic is neutral, the ZS understeers, the car doesn't handle as well (IMO) and then there's the looks.
To me, a 5 year old VTi was a much better car all around than a new ZS, and that's without taking money into account. To make the problem worse, they were still producing the ZS as competition to the Civic Type R (among many others) and wondered why it didn't sell. It wasn't as good as the previous generation, let alone the current one, and the ZS wasn't born until over a year after the VTi had been discontinued.
The Rover 75 was a pretty good car, mostly. It suffered reliability and build quality niggles but no worse than something french, however it overshadowed in a big way by it's competition, and largely too little too late.
The less I say about some of the other cars (cityrover, streetrover etc) the better.
Now, onto the company.
I'll get my first statement out of the way.
The unions and the workers killed Rover.
Right, that's done, now onto the explaination. BMW should have been the company's saviour, they had plans, they invested huge amounts of money, and they knew how to make the company profitable again. They recognised Rover's biggest problem (that the factories were outdated, that too much manpower was being used per car and that this was making them cost a fortune.) The difference in cost per car between Longbridge and somewhere like Nissan's plant in sunderland could be measured in multiples (I can't find the figures at the moment, but I remember the difference was insane)
BMW proposed a modernisation and restructuring plan that would have seen substantial job losses (although less than happened due to the bankruptcy) along with changes in working practices that would have gone a long way to secure the company's future. The unions went mental, lied to the workers by claiming it was unnecessary and threatened to strike. It was this action that caused BMW to say "fine." and sell the lot to the Phoenix consortium (keeping back the BMW developed Mini and Landrover, which was always financially independant of Rover and consistantly profitable anyway).
The Phoenix consortium never had the money, the know-how or the will to correct the problems, the staff got what they thought they wanted, no changes, the same ineffienct, expensive and unsustainable working practices, right up until the point where the problems killed the company once and for all.
The quality of the workmanship on rover cars is shocking, although this is as much down to outdated working practices as the staff themselves.
It may seem like I'm doing a hatchet job on rover here, but I'm not. I'm being realistic.
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