How Ford would have made a Rover January 8, 2010
Posted by richard in : History , trackbackFORD finally won ownership to the Rover brand name in 2006. But it was providing aid for the brand even before then.
Secret talks in the late 90s were conducted, to sidestep then-chief Bernd Pischetreider’s plans to invest £1.7bn in Rover. Instead of spending so much to develop two new platforms, a future mid-range Rover would have been developed with Ford.
The plan was to take the Focus and develop it into a Rover. BMW engineers, said Car magazine’s Hilton Holloway back in 1999, went so far as to evaluate the Ford Focus.
Their verdict? The VW Golf, which was initially to have formed the base of the Rover, is a fine car… ‘but the Focus is better – almost as good as we envisage the next Golf being.’
And how would they have turned it into a Rover? Easy: ‘new rubber mountings, springs and dampers.’
This has to rank up among the biggest opportunities missed in the entire history of Rover. Despite an insider telling Holloway ‘on a 1-to-10 provability scale, we’ve reached 8 with Ford’. The Mk1 Focus is brilliant. It could have made a superb Rover 200 replacement.
Volvo proved as much by taking the Mk2 Focus platform and creating the Volvo C30. Which is brilliant. Looks nothing like a Focus, neither outside nor in. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more it pains me: seems the ‘unforeseen’, which would have scuppered the deal our insider expected by March 2000, did indeed happen.
Groan…
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