Austin Rover Group

History

Following the financial collapse of the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC) in 1975 and the stark Ryder Report on the ailing firm, the resulting government bail-out and nationalisation saw the company being renamed to British Leyland (BL). The car manufacturing subsidiary of BL became Leyland Cars, and later BL Cars Ltd, and it was this entity which ultimately became Austin Rover.

However, the huge industrial relations problems, ineffectual management and product duplication that had plagued the company up to the nationalisation continued throughout the late 1970s. The problems centred on Longbridge union leader and shop steward Derek Robinson (nicknamed "Red Robbo" by the British press). Robinson had assumed a greater level of control over BL than any of its senior managers, and his network of union leaders in the various BL plants had the power to end production if he had instructed them to do so.

The Labour government of the time ran out of patience with Robinson, and appointed South African-born corporate troubleshooter Sir Michael Edwardes to turn BL around. His first task was to curb the large amount of power that the trade unions had over the company. After discovering Robinson's links with various communist groups, the company amassed sufficient evidence claiming that his actions were intended to deliberately damage both BL itself and the UK economy. As a result of this, he was dismissed in 1979. Secondly, Edwardes began a ruthless programme of factory closures and sell-offs. The biggest casualties of this were the MG assembly plant in Abingdon, and the Triumph plants in Speke and Canley. BL pulled out of entire markets – for example the large Leyland tractors range was sold off wholesale to Marshall. Thirdly, he entered into a collaborative agreement with Honda, the first product of this alliance being the Triumph Acclaim, which paved the way for the joint development of a range of cars which spearheaded the company's revival in the 1980s and 1990s. Lastly, the number of BL dealerships in the UK was trimmed down drastically.

The new, slimmer British Leyland was organised into a series of groups. Austin Rover handled the mass production of cars, with the lower- to mid-market cars being badged as Austins and the middle- to upper-market cars as Rovers. Light commercial vehicle production (4x4s and vans) was managed by the Land Rover Group, whilst full-size commercial vehicles were built by Leyland Trucks and Leyland Bus. The luxury manufacturer Jaguar was de-merged from BL in 1984 and privatized, later taken over by Ford in 1989, and was ultimately reunited with former BL stablemate Land Rover in 2000 to form what is now Jaguar Land Rover.

Sales of Austin Rover products were reasonably strong, though not quite as high as the sales achieved by some of the British Leyland products – the Maestro and Montego for instance did less well in the marketplace than their respective predecessors, the Austin Allegro and Morris Marina, despite being fundamentally superior vehicles for their time. The Austin/MG Metro was regularly among the top five selling cars in Britain throughout the 1980s, and in the early part of the decade it was the best selling supermini in the country. The Metro, which was launched in 1980, gave the firm a much-needed competitor in the entry-level hatchback market and filled a gap in the range vacated by a scaling down of Mini and Austin Allegro production.

The Austin Maestro (launched in 1983), was initially very popular, but sales dipped towards the end of the decade and in 1989 it was the 19th best selling new car in the UK. This was less of a problem thanks to the follow-up of the Triumph Acclaim with the first generation Rover 200 of 1984 – the second product of the Honda alliance and one of the few strong-selling small family saloons of its era. So in effect, Austin Rover was selling around 100,000 cars of this size every year during the mid to late 1980s, regaining its share of the sector after the scaling-down of Austin Allegro production in its final years. The similarly sized Austin Maxi had already been discontinued in 1981 to allow the Triumph Acclaim to take over its production lines.

The Austin Montego went on sale in 1984 and sold fairly well, though it was unable to match the sales success of the sector's established favourites – the Ford Sierra and Vauxhall Cavalier. The car had been in the pipeline since the late 1970s when the company's main competitors in this sector were the Morris Marina and Princess, but the Montego actually replaced the Morris Ital and Austin Ambassador which were the respective facelifted versions of those two cars.

Austin Rover's executive car, the Rover 800, was launched in 1986 as the third product of its venture with Honda, sharing its development with the Honda Legend. This car also sold well, being a popular competitor for the likes of the Ford Granada and Vauxhall Carlton. It was also sold in America under the Sterling brand, but this project was quickly shelved due to unacceptable product quality issues that led to low sales.

Austin Rover's decision not to replace sports cars like the MG MGB and Triumph TR7 was justified by the fact that such cars were no longer popular in the early 1980s, and many other manufacturers had also stopped – or were about to stop – production of small two-seater sports cars. Buyers were instead being guided to "hot hatchbacks", following a trend set by the Volkswagen Golf GTI in 1976. By 1985, Austin Rover had launched a line-up of performance variants of its Metro and Maestro hatchbacks and the Montego saloon. These cars were badged as MG models and proved popular, especially in the form of the MG Metro. MG models accounted for approximately 10% of Metro, Maestro and Montego production between 1982 and 1991. The Rover Group continued production of the MG Metro until 1990 when it was replaced by the Rover Metro GTi. MG Maestro and Montego production continued at Cowley until July 1991 when they were discontinued to make way for the GTi variant of the Rover 200 and 400. However, the last Maestro and Montego examples survived in production until the end of 1994, just months before the 200 and 400 ranges which had been expected to replace them were discontinued.

Consolidation and renaming

In 1986, Austin Rover's parent company, BL plc, was renamed "Rover Group", and the truck and bus businesses were subsequently de-merged and sold off to DAF and Volvo, respectively. The spare parts and logistics arm Unipart was also spun out in 1987. After an abortive attempt in 1988 to divest Land Rover to General Motors, the entire Rover Group was sold off by the British government in 1988 to British Aerospace. The car making subsidiary Austin Rover Group Ltd was renamed "Rover Group Ltd", which saw the effective disappearance of the Austin Rover name and brand, even though the Austin badging had been removed from the Mini, Metro, Maestro and Montego models in 1987. By 1991, all Austin Rover dealer signage had been changed to the new claret and beige "Rover" branding, and use of the old blue and green "chevron" logo had ceased, although it made sporadic appearances on the cars themselves (see below).

The combine now known as Rover Group remained in BAe ownership until 1994, when it was sold to BMW. It remained in BMW ownership for six years before being sold to the "Phoenix Consortium" in May 2000, incorporating the MG and Rover marques and becoming MG Rover, which lasted five years before going bankrupt. The ownership of the Mini brand, however, remained in BMW ownership, as did ownership of the Cowley factory, which began production of an all-new Mini in 2001. Land Rover, meanwhile was sold to Ford, who had already purchased Jaguar in 1989.

MG production was revived in 2007 by new owner Nanjing Automobile, while the Rover marque was purchased by Ford in 2006, only to be transferred to ownership of Indian carmaker Tata in 2008, as Tata also took over Land Rover and Jaguar to form Jaguar Land Rover. The Rover marque has yet to be re-used nearly a decade after the last car wearing the badge was made.

Branding and logo

BL had been using the Austin Morris brand loosely since the original 1968 merger to manage and market the marques operated by the former British Motor Corporation, but it was not until 1978 that it was given a formal corporate identity (distinct from the Jaguar Rover Triumph (JRT) arm of the company) with the blue and green "chevron" logo, which began appearing on Austin and Morris-badged BL cars in that year - the Princess and the van/pick-up versions of the Morris Marina were the first vehicles to wear the logo. However, this separate branding strategy was later abandoned and by 1983 the chevron would be later expanded to represent virtually all of BL's marques and business activities in the public domain, eventually supplanting BL's own roundel logo (affectionately known as the "plughole") and would ultimately become the logo of the entire Austin Rover Group.

The ARG chevron officially remained in use until 1988, when ARG's rename and re-privatisation into the Rover Group saw it gradually disappear. The Austin name was retired in 1987, however the logo still appeared on the badging of the former Austin models, and the VIN plates of the cars still read "Austin Rover Group Ltd", since this was still the manufacturer's official name until 1989. For that model year the chevron logo was finally dropped in favour of a black silhouetted version of the Rover "longship" badge upon which the model name (Metro, Maestro, Montego) was applied, although with the exception of the re-engineered R6 Metro of 1990, the Rover name was never officially used for these models.

One interesting anomaly from the ARG era is that the chevron logo was stamped into thousands of BL/Rover Group vehicle components, many of which survived on Rover and Land Rover models well into the 2000s; indeed there are still some components - most notably on the Land Rover Defender (nearing the end of production in 2015), which still bear both it and some still even bear the older BL roundel logo.

Timeline