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Rover was a British automotive marque used between 1904 and 2005. It was launched as a bicycle maker called Rover Company in 1878, before manufacturing cars in 1904. The brand used the iconic Viking longship as its logo. Despite a state-controlled absorption by the Leyland Motor Corporation (LMC) in 1967 and subsequent mergers, nationalisation, and de-mergers, the Rover marque retained its identity first as an independent subsidiary division of LMC, then through variously named groups of British Leyland through the 1970s and into the 1980s. The Rover marque became the primary brand of the then newly renamed Rover Group in 1988 as it passed first through the hands of British Aerospace and into the ownership of BMW Group. Sharing technology with Honda and financial investment during the BMW ownership led to a revival of the marque 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. BMW retained ownership of the Rover marque, allowing MG Rover to use it under licence. In April 2005, Rover branded cars ceased to be produced when the MG Rover Group became insolvent. BMW sold the Rover marque to Ford in 2006 for approximately £6 million, the latter exercising an option of first refusal to buy it dating back to its purchase of Land Rover. Ford thus reunited the original Rover Company marques, primarily for brand-protection reasons. In March 2008, Ford reached agreement with Tata Motors of India to include the Rover marque as part of the sale of their Jaguar Land Rover operations to them, alongside related Daimler and Lanchester marques. Legally the Rover marque is the property of Land Rover under the terms of Ford's purchase of the name in 2006. In the middle of the decade, SAIC Motor Corporation Limited attempted to acquire MG Rover, but in 2005 was outbid by another Chinese automaker, Nanjing Automobile. SAIC did manage to obtain some MG Rover technology that was incorporated into a new line of luxury sedans under the Roewe marque. With no Rover vehicles currently in production, the marque is considered dormant. ==British Leyland== In 1970, Rover combined its skill in producing comfortable saloons and the rugged Land Rover 4x4 to produce the Range Rover, one of the first vehicles (preceded by the Jeep Wagoneer and IH Scout) to combine off-road ability and comfortable versatility. Powered by the licence-built ex-Buick V8 engine, it had innovative features such as a permanent four-wheel drive system, all-coil spring suspension, and disc brakes on all wheels. Able to reach speeds of up to yet also capable of extreme off-road use, the original Range Rover design remained in production for the next 26 years. The company's other major project at this time was the P8, a successor, styled by David Bache, for the 3-litre. The car's shape owed much to Detroit, with a front bumper concealed under a "bumperless" polyurethane nose, in a manner reminiscent of contemporary Pontiacs, and a side profile reminiscent of a slightly chunkier Opel Rekord.〔 Although the original brief was for the car to be no longer externally than a Rover 2000, management changes led the project to be redefined as it progressed, and the P8 scheduled for launch at the 1971 London Motor Show was substantially larger than any existing Rover sedan, with the Rover V8 engine expanded for this application to 4.4 litres.〔 The car followed the P6 in employing a steel frame structure with bolt-on steel or aluminium panels. The manufacturer was nevertheless short of cash and focus at this time: the P8 was one of several new model projects subjected to a slipping time-line.〔 By the revised launch date towards the end of 1972 the considerable development costs had been expended and pre-production prototypes had even undergone extensive testing in Finland. Production capacity had been set aside for the P8 at the Solihull plant.〔 However, an expenditure review in 1970 found the project subjected to criticism from Sir William Lyons, by now an influential member of the British Leyland board: speculation has arisen that Lyons saw the car as a threat to future investment in the recently launched Jaguar XJ6.〔 It later emerged that Rover's contender would not have been particularly cheap or easy to build, and the shrinkage of the European market for sedans of this size that followed the 1973 oil price shock suggest that abandonment of the project in 1972 - even at the eleventh hour - may have been the right decision for British Leyland; but the P8 was not entirely ummourned nearly thirty years later.〔 Some of the P8's styling cues turned up two years later on the Leyland P76, and the driver's view of the instrument panel (albeit without the Austin Allegro style "quartic" steering wheel that appears in one of the surviving pictures of it) would have been not entirely unfamiliar to the driver of a 1976 Rover 3500.〔 As British Leyland struggled through financial turmoil and an industrial-relations crisis during the 1970s, it was effectively nationalized after a multibillion-pound government cash injection in 1975. Michael Edwardes was brought in to head the company. The Rover SD1 of 1976 was an excellent car, but was beset with so many build quality and reliability issues it never delivered on its great promise. Following the closure of the Triumph factory at Canley, production of the TR7 and TR8 was moved to Solihull; soon after, a savage programme of cutbacks in the late 1970s led to the end of car production at Solihull, which was turned over for Land Rover production only. The TR7/TR8 was discontinued while SD1 production moved to Cowley. All future Rover cars would be made in the former Austin and Morris plants in Longbridge and Cowley, respectively. In 1979, British Leyland (or as it was now officially known, BL Ltd.) began a long relationship with the Honda Motor Company of Japan. The result was a cross-holding structure, where Honda took a 20% stake in the company while the company took a 20% stake in Honda's UK subsidiary. The deal was thought to be mutually beneficial: Honda used its British operations as a launchpad into Europe, and the company could pool resources with Honda in developing new cars. Austin Rover Group was formed in 1982 as the mass-market car manufacturing subsidiary of BL, with the separate Rover Company becoming effectively defunct. In the 1980s, the slimmed-down BL used the Rover brand on a range of cars codeveloped with Honda. The first Honda-sourced Rover model, released in 1984, was the Rover 200, which, like the Triumph Acclaim that it replaced, was based on the Honda Ballade. Similarly, in Australia, the Honda Quint (known in Europe as the Quintet) and Integra were badged as the Rover Quintet and 416i. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Rover (marque)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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