Rover: The Long Goodbye

When the motor car came in to existence Rover was the genesis of the car industry in Britain .. so why did a notable car become extinct.

It starts with its birth in 1904 and explains how it became a great and distinct car and engineering brand notable for innovation and quality which allowed it to grow.

That is until it was coerced to being merged with BMC (Austin, Jaguar) and Triumph to form that now historical lame duck British Leyland in 1968 where for the next 20 years it was corrupted with the rot of BMC and so began its decline as other foreign car brands grew in stature. Despite the unions and management one factor that it did not mention was the decline of apprenticeships and how Comprehensive education also contributed with engineering skills declining, no wonder the British education system has become dilapidated.

At the dawn of the 1990s it was hastily sold off as a subsidiary to foreign brands but as a result had become an anachronistic and laughable imitation or copy of those brands from Honda to BMW becoming irrelevant until its inevitable extinction in the early 2000s.

The wisest strategy to have done was to sell what was left of BL and the rest of the British car industry to mid range foreign conglomerates for domestic production especially since Brexit where the average person could afford and outright but a car and keep the Industrial heartland flourishing.

The only major criticism I have on this episode is it is unfair to the Rover SD1 a great car in its own right. It was once our family car and lasted for 6 years. They were produced for 10 years and were popularly used by the Police so they were not that bad. The SD1 series 2 remains my favourite car ever to this day.

The end line of this episode is the people mourning the loss of Rover. It makes you wonder what if BL was not formed could it have survived to this day in its own right as a universal brand - probably as I read in an article that it had high quality, innovation, simple engineering and modern styling - very poignant and dearly missed.

Rover: The Long Goodbye is a documentary charting the rise and fall of one of the UK's most famous car brands. Rather than focus in detail on the many companies which owned the name from the original Rover Car Company through British Leyland to Rover Group and finally MG Rover and cover the history and politics involved, the film instead covers Rover as a brand and it's application on various different and questionably suitable cars.

I find this to be a very short sighted and bias approach, because the documentary tends to focus on all the negative points of Rover's history, and it's use on low quality cars like the Tata Indica, while ignoring much of the good work achieved by the car makers behind it. No mention is made of the K-Series engine, or the best selling Rover of all time, the R8 200/400 series co-developed with Honda. Multiple exaggerated clips are used from Top Gear, a program presented by a man infamous for his hatred for his own domestic car maker. It is in this respect that I find The Long Goodbye fails, because it focuses completely on the shortcomings but ignores the good work which was achieved by the British firm. Perhaps this is to be expected from a documentary of this kind, but I think a fairer and more neutral assessment would have been more appropriate.

Films like this are only serving to perpetuate the already high level of disregard for our own domestic car makers in the UK. A documentary which acknowledged the successes of the firm as well as it's short comings would have been a much better film. The one part of this I did agree with was the statement that all the people who are mourning the loss of Rover only have themselves to blame for not buying them. You would never see the French destroying their own car industry, so why did it happen here? Since when has the British national hobby been destroying our own heritage?

In its heyday, Rovers were great cars in the UK and a strong prestige brand. However dilution of the brand and successive management failures in the 1970's saw that shine rapidly fade. Attempts later to win it back saw the company mired in history and nostalgia while other companies produced more modern cars in step with society in the way that Rover once was. Slumping sales then saw the company offloaded by BMW for £10 to a concern with no capital for investment, who resorted to making cars in India and slapping a Rover badge on them in the UK.

And so Rover came to an end – more or less. Something still does exist somewhere and at time of writing the news is saying that production could be returning to Longbridge in Q2 or Q3 this year, however the film mostly ignores the small bit of movement that continues and instead wisely looks at the bigger picture. Without going into too much detail, it charts the rise and decline of Rover very much in terms of the brand rather than the specifics of Union actions and individual management decisions. This is a wise decision because the film is slicker and more accessible for it, which is not to say that it simplifies things because, from my point of view it gets it right. My girlfriend is a pretty aggressive driver, I'll give you that, but nobody gets her goat more than "Rover drivers" as she puts it as she (perhaps correctly) seems to find them all older people, driving very slowly on their way to the shops, uncertain and maybe a bit confused by all the activity on the road. They hanker for a quieter time when life was not so rushed and a bit more dignified. This is maybe my girlfriend's stereotypical view of them but she is backed up by this documentary because that is one of the factors that killed off Rover.

The team behind the film had done their research and tell the story really well, using a select group of talking heads effectively while also drawing down lots of archive footage. One commentator hits the nail on the head when talking about the mourning of Rover – it is not just about the car itself, but the death of yet another British manufacturing/engineering company, something the UK used to be world leaders in but now find ourselves out skilled and undercut by much of the world. The use of footage from Top Gear is perhaps a bit obvious but in fairness it is the main car review show (or at least was before they got obsessed with the FHM and Nuts crowd baying for explosions, toys and fast expensive cars). The narration is even and a pleasant voice to listen to and his dialogue is the thread that holds the film together.

Overall then, a brisk history of Rover that maybe misses out the detail but serves as an overview of the rise and decline of a British brand. It is interesting and accessible even though it could have done more and felt like it could easily have been a bit longer.