Regular readers of this site know that there are only three natural positions for a product in the car market: luxury, sporting and economy. And?
And don’t get pushed too far from them. That’s the no-man’s land of not very sporty, not very cheap and not very luxurious. The unmarked graves of Lincoln (unfilled at the moment), Saab, Oldsmobile and Lancia are all in that bourne from which no car maker returns. Apart from Saab and Borgward.
On with the story.
When BMW bought Rover they quickly repositioned Rover so it was less about sportiness and more about comfort (which is physical luxury). They also determined that Rovers would be less expensive than BMWs. At the same time, Rovers always had to be a cut above. ‘Above all, it’s a Rover – that’s one slogan’. And later we had ‘Relax, it’s a Rover.’
The epitome of the Relax Rovers was the 1999 Rover 75 about which a lot has been written. In brief, it seemed to sell quite well despite the skewed focus of its imagery, design and branding. However, it was in that no-man’s land I mentioned earlier. Time to break for the border.
When MG-Rover gained control of their product destiny the first thing they did was to try to invade the performance sector that BMW had been hogging during their stewardship of Longbridge.
With not a lot of money and not a lot of time, Rover’s three main products were restyled as MGs. This took 14 months. The car journalists were impressed. “Only 14 months after the company was bought, these cars [MG ZT, ZR and ZS] have been designed and developed, not as some motor show what-if, but here in the metal, on the road….”
I think that the author, Paul Horrell who is reliably always well-intentioned but often wide of the mark, over-estimated the effort required for the cosmetic changes wrought to the 75. Essentially the Rover 75 was painted over to hide the chrome which was deemed too middle-aged and middle-England. At the front end the bumper and grille assembly was reduced to one major part, down from five (two lamps, a grille, and two chrome embellishments).
I judge the work to have required under a month of modelling and CAD construction. Much of that was probably importing the various parts into one model and simply filling in the gaps between them to make one item out of five. The upshot of that was a much cheaper component and not the work of miracles as it might at first appear.
The impression you get looking back is of expediency and a few key engineers making a statement about what Rover should have been rather than turning out a well-balanced, though sporty car. The MG’s V6 was loud and the suspension biased too much towards the track. While Car admired the ZT’s character they didn’t actually think it was good enough, once you looked past the Union Flag waving. In April 2003 the ZT estate came third to the Ford Mondeo and Subaru Forester in a test of sporty family cars.
The MG Rover move was not inspired improvisation but rather a distraction.
What else could Rover have done other than to spray paint the 75’s chrome and cost-cut the bumpers? Well, if they had not been hamstrung by the British press’s ingrained hatred of British styling cues, they could have simply offered 75s with a less harsh version of the MG chassis modifications and engine tunes, a harder, sportier 75 minus the crass add-ons. Stupid? No, it works for BMW with their M-range.
Visually there was nothing much wrong with the 75. It looked like a very high quality car and 15 years later still looks rather out-of-time. The paint is astonishingly glossy, the interiors durable. By underlining MG’s sportiness, MG-Rover was in a sense running away from all that was good about the 75. As BMW’s come in a variety of flavours, so could the 75. From cushy to bracing was all possible within the body shell with only a few badges and colour options needed to effect the distinction.
I will turn to the final paragraph of the September 2001 article by Paul Horrell (in Car). It pitted the MG ZT-190 against the BMW 320 SE (with a 2.2 litre straight six). It’s worth reading for its delicious irony: “Something rather odd happens when you line up these cars behind some well-worn national stereotypes. The Savile Row, buttoned-down one with the slightly aloof English reserve? That would be….the BMW, actually.” The mullet-wearing, stein-hoisting extrovert one with the occasionally over-literal sense of humour? More like the MG. The BMW is slightly the better car, as it should be, given the price, but the MG’s character is more immediately engaging, open and warm, and so it makes the BMW feel stand offish.” And now the funny part: “Tough times, then, for the 3-series. Just as the Jaguar X-type begins to gnaw away at the top end Threes, here’s the MG to have a pop at the lower ones. The British motor industry has mounted a two-pronged attack at one of the world’s most iconic cars and blimey, this time you had better take it seriously.”
Hmmm.
It would have worked, perhaps, if the British motoring press had been more willing to look at the X-type and 75’s competences rather than focus on the styling. In the end that’s a matter for the public to decide on but too many swallowed the party line that the Rover was too trad and the Jaguar too Mondeo-in-drag.
The underlying discussion is really perhaps about why the British are so uncomfortable with what they do best. When served up at £150,000 in the form of a Bentley Continental or Rolls Royce Silver Seraph the consensus is that Britishness is a wonderful thing. At £22,000 it’s anathema and too redolent of semi-detached houses and Wilton swirly carpets. Which is it?
Driven To Write 
History (fairly or not) will likely remember the Phoenix Four as a bunch of dodgy car dealers who got lucky. As such, it’s hardly surprising that they got out the Ripspeed catalogue in order to make their motors look a bit more lairy on the forecourt. And, when they thought they needed a bit more welly, they got a mate who was handy with a spanner to pop in a big V8. Then, ‘cos you’ve got to have a bit of window dressing to bring in the punters, they tarted up a sporty jobbie they picked up on the cheap from another dodgy car dealer in Italy …. and so on. Rover’s back room people, hitherto ever resourceful on a shoestring, let the joins show all too literally with these. By then there was such a desperate amateurishness to the whole enterprise that you didn’t need to be a car aficionado (by which, of course, I mean snob) to notice.
Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that a Rover 75 V8 Tourer is the sort of oddball car I’d grow fond of if I owned it.
The world (and to a large extent the country itself) seems to harbour the misconception that the average British subject perpetually labours under the yolk of the past. Whilst nostalgia does play a part in the national mindset, by virtue of the UK’s geography and its history as a trading nation, that mindset is intensely hybridised. This is a country where continental lager is sold in a pint glass and when a night out ends with a curry and chips. As good a car as it was, the 75 evoked a pure form of nostalgia that does not exist. It was a Bavarian’s warm and fuzzy idea of Old England: a mock Tudor house without the solar panels, broadband, or indeed the BMW 3 Series sat on the drive.
Richard, you make some really valid and quite poignant – er – points here about MGR taking the 75 to an unnecessarily extreme place, when it was a perfectly nice car that just needed a bit of realignment. I liked the 75 a lot when it was first launched as it was, I thought, quite a nicely executed ‘hommage’ to cars like the 3500, with quite tasteful details. The interior concept was lovely, with the emphasis on snug comfort, although the sepia-tinted dials were perhaps a little too ironic. Alas, it was, as we know (and you correctly list the victims of the time) not what themarket wanted, in general. Moreover, although it did get support from a nice estate version, there was not the range of engines and body styles to provide real critical mass and profitability from the platform. We tend to mock Rovers of that and the preceding Honda partnership era for their somewhat naff interpretation of “english-ness”, but they did do that look better than contemporary competitors, and, in general, their interiors had a warmth, airy-ness, comfort and (dare I offer) taste that Ford, Vauxhall and VW could not approach. The R6 Rover 200 in particular was a successful, if compromised and unadventurous blend.
That should have read “R8 Rover 200”, sorry!
I would argue that the R8 200 was the last great Rover: independent suspension all round, a smooth and torquey engine, great styling and a best in class interior. It was all the things a Rover should be, and it knocked the competition into a cocked hat. Not only that; it was modern in the way the best Rovers always have been.
How fickle fashion is, and how much undeserved power people give to certain motoring celebrities (entertainers of a sort) by their addiction to what those people might say.
It became trendy to mock Rover (as others) to fit in with the new lad and laddette culture, the new car specifier (not necessarily the buyer) wasn’t going to tick the form for a company ZT when the rest of their new build housing estate had German labels parked on their driveways and Next labels in their wardrobes, whats so wrong with being an individual even being classed as eccentric, far preferable to being just another one of a million clones doing as bidden a marketeers dream come true.
Personally i loved the 75 especially when drive via the correct wheels with the V8, though as with the Jaguar S type the first edition was somehow more right, more reserved, quietly handsome?, than the facelift.
It’s the V6 I like best with dark blue paint in Connoisseur trim.
I remember Car running a piece on ‘Britishness’ in car design, around the time of the Rover 600’s launch. They wheeled in Patrick le Quement, Brian Sewell, Stephen Bayley, Rowan Atkinson and Alan Clark to give their opinion on what they saw as quintessentially British designs. The inference being the 600 was part of this tradition, which I seem to recall was seen as a positive. The cultural changes of the late ’90s could be said to have caught the likes of Rover and perhaps Jaguar on the hop. They didn’t see the wind changing and it cost them dearly.
The old headlamp-shaped bumper shutline bothers me a lot on the facelifted 75s, it makes the whole front clip look like it’s glued on (even more so on the MG).
That always bothered me, even on the prefacelift Rover. It looks like there was a last minute design change to remove the indicators, although apparently that shape was always the designer’s intention.
It looks as if the wing was stolen off a Rover 400 and it was too costly to change the mould ; )