UPDATE: Ford Puts Tata In Pole Position To Buy Jaguar, Land Rover
LONDON (Dow Jones) -- Ford Motor Co. on Thursday made India's Tata Motors the front-runner to buy its Jaguar and Land Rover brands, part of a plan to boost the ailing U.S. automaker.Thus Jaguar joins MG and Austin, now owned by Nanjing Automobile Group--originally a repair service column in the East China Field Army of Mao's People's Liberation Army, and soon to merge with China's largest automaker, SAIC--and Lotus Cars, owned for many years now by Proton Holdings of Malaysia."Ford is committed to focused negotiations at a more detailed level with Tata Motors concerning the potential sale of the combined Jaguar Land Rover business, " said Lewis Booth, executive vice president with responsibility for Premier Automotive Group and Ford of Europe, in a statement.
And so the last dust settles from an era that ended long ago, but perhaps it's fitting for this blog. Chinese, Indians, and Malaysians all cook way better than the English.
English built, Chinese owned MG-TF returns to production after two-year hiatus:
3 comments:
Huh. Sounds like the beginning of the end for a once-venerable marque.
Just read Pat Bedard's "Stupid Car Tricks" article from Dec 2007 about Jaguar adaptive cruise control - essentially saying that the he experienced a half-dozen driving situations in which the XJR dangerously decided to apply the brakes while under high speed cruise because it decided something was unsafe - which wasn't. Pretty spooky, and the only form of cruise offered in the XJR.
Yikes! No, spontaneous high-speed braking doesn't sound like much fun at all. Perhaps the end for the marque began sooner than we realized.
Gotta say that Lotus hasn't done badly at all under Proton's ownership. It seems like the Elise must have been at least partway into development by the time of the sale, but good things have been coming out of the company pretty steadily since then.
Perhaps things will work out as well or better for Tata and Nanjing/SAIC.
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