When Rover Met BMW - Episode 1: Don't Mention The War

[@mikeluscher159]

I think I caught the list of OG Top Gear presenters? I remember Quentin Wilson's coverage of the 200 launch

[@johnathankain8033]

If someone want to know why rover failed - this shows it in all its glory. Smug and condescending of their customers and competitors with a healthy dose of jokes at the Italians expense.

[@QuoPaperPlane]

Pretty sure the Italians didn't take offence. After all, if we can laugh at ourselves then we can laugh at others or is that too British for you?

[@aibohex]

When Quentin Wilson was one of us.

[@_Ben4810]

What Britain did best....Producing people (in this case motoring journalists...) who thought they were so clever in their smugness of being overly-critical & slagging off the products of our own industries & poor old MG Rover...Nowhere else in the world did or does this happen...a truly British disease that even Clarkson made a career out of......🙄

[@Ben-jq5oo]

Spot On.

[@andyb3666]

@@jemimallah sorry don’t agree to be honest. The damage was done years before BMW came along, through years & years of lack of investment in Rover Group by British Aerospace who owned it at the time & as a result being hampered by expensive Honda licensing agreements for all the cars. Given time it probably could’ve been turned round like VAG did with Skoda. But it was losing far too much cash to wait, the poor DM >GBP exchange rate was the final straw. So I would level the blame at BAe managers not Rover.

[@AndyRRR0791]

They spent too much time worrying about Britishness and not enough producing the best damn thing that could be made for the money.

[@Ben-jq5oo]

Yes. If the workers were truly proud to be British they would have upped the build quality and lobbied management, through their shop stewards, to increase spend per vehicle to enable decent rust proofing for example. This way their product would have competed more successfully with those from VW. They would have kept more repeat customers and not gained a poor reputation. A bit of creative thinking applied and management could have bought in a new Golf mk1, stripped it down along side an Allegro and gone from there. Very sad.

[@andyb3666]

@@Ben-jq5oo you’re talking about 20 years before this though.

[@sonnylatchstring]

And if you are then confronted with, for example, those 3 baboons from Topgear who are making fun of everything, then such an introduction has failed in advance.

[@Ben-jq5oo]

I stopped watching it when I realised how toxic Clarkson’s humour was. The way he used it to influence May and Hammond, along with the audience, is the definition of a malignant narcissist. No better than Trump.

[@jamesmitchell8922]

In 2000, the relationship reached an all time low.

[@jamesbaggaley1460]

They wonder why Rover group failed. Bunch of amateurs fannying about.

[@mfitzy100]

Why would you offer up German food in England like this? Utterly ridiculous. If I was in a different country I want to try the local cuisine

[@andyb3666]

Germans know what they like and know that they do it best 😂

[@gleng6812]

Doing the Germans a Favour! 😂

[@gleng6812]

Doing the Germans a Favour! 😂

[@gemspotting6252]

Rover was dead long before BMW rocked up - they killed the whole lot in the seventies through a chronic lack of investment

[@tris7]

Jesus. I honestly thought this was a spoof!! I used to think Rover died because of poor investment etc etc now I’m sure it was the workers. school boy jokers that seemed to have forgotten they were at work not in the playground!!!

[@darendalton856]

Management was absolutely appalling in landrover and rover cars

[@tris7]

Yes but the way the workers seem to have forgotten that they are at a place of work, they're acting like a bunch of jokers. I can see why management gave up @@darendalton856

[@owenevans83]

Same

[@leighbyrne1]

Absolute amateur hour in fact embarrassing no wonder they failed.

[@mfitzy100]

Having known what happened subsequently you can absolutely see how and why things went belly up fast. I reckon BMW didn’t realise actually how bad things were in rover and how far behind they were. Without Honda there was nothing much there at this stage

[@leighbyrne1]

@@mfitzy100 Yeah I have to agree all Rover produced was shiteboxes at that stage.

[@darendalton856]

Ask John towers how he hid all the faults on rolling road from bmw pushing cars off the track before wolfganger arrived