The Rover Company

The Rover Company was a British automobile manufacturing company originally founded as Starley & Sutton Co. of Coventry in 1878. After developing the template for the modern bicycle with its Rover Safety Bicycle of 1885, the company moved into the automotive industry. It started building Rover cars, using their established marquee with the iconic Viking Longship, from 1904 onwards. Land Rover vehicles were added from 1947 onwards, with all production based in Solihull after moving to these premises after World War II. Later on, Rover cars were also produced in Cowley.

Despite a state-controlled absorption by Leyland Motors in 1967 and subsequent mergers and nationalization, the Rover Company retained its identity first as an independent subsidiary division, and then through variously named combines of British Leyland through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The Rover marquee became the primary brand of the newly set up Rover Group as it passed first through the hands of British Aerospace and then into the ownership of BMW Group. Technological know-how gained from Honda and financial investment during the BMW ownership led to a revival of the Rover marquee during the 1990s in its core midsize segment.

In 2000, BMW sold the Rover and related MG car activities of the Rover Group to the Phoenix Consortium, who established the MG Rover Group at Longbridge and sold Land Rover vehicle activities to the Ford Motor Company. Although the decision was down to strategic, financial, and managerial reasons and less related to problems with the automotive quality per se at that time, the intense media reporting severely eroded the perceived trust and sustainability of the marquee. Nevertheless, BMW retained ownership of the Rover marque, allowing MG Rover only to use it under licence. In April 2005, Rover cars ceased to be produced when the MG Rover Group became insolvent.

In July 2005, Nanjing Auto and SAIC acquired the physical assets & tooling and some vehicular intellectual property rights, respectively, with the plan to merge and resume production of MG Rover car designs in China and at Longbridge from 2007 onwards. However, on 18 September 2006, BMW sold the Rover marquee to Ford for approximately £6-million, heralding an option of first refusal to buy it as a result of its purchase of Land Rover. Ford thus reunited the original Rover Company marques, primarily for brand-protective reasons, in preparation for divesting its Premier Automotive Group subsidiary.

In March 2008, Ford reached agreement with Tata Motors of India to include the Rover marquee as part of the sale of their Jaguar Land Rover operations to them, alongside related Daimler and Lanchester marques.

With no Rover cars currently in production, the marquee is considered dormant.

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 previously worked with his uncle, James Starley (father of the cycle trade), who began by 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-wheel designs. Cycling Magazine said the Rover had "set the pattern to the world"; 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.

In the late 1930s, in anticipation of the potential hostilities that would become World War II, the British government started a rearmament 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 was approached by the government to support Frank Whittle in developing the gas turbine engine. Whittle's company, Power Jets, had no production facilities; however, 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 the design changes made without his approval, but the first test engines to the W2B design were built in an unused cotton mill in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, in October 1941. Rolls-Royce took an interest in the new technology, and an agreement was reached in 1942 in which 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; it would become the home of the Land Rover.

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