Hello Paul & Ruth, I too worked for a British company that was ultimately purchased by a German, competitor, who despite initial pronouncements about keeping the company and the brand going, 6 months down the line promptly closed the whole thing, after cherry picking the best bits. The story has a lot of parallels with Rover, so I have considerable empathy with the workforce.
It is my view that British Leyland whilst they had some some really difficult issues with quality, their products had many technical strong points. BL's management, were at fault in that they never grasped the need for improving quality, in the systematic way that other companies abroad managed. The break up of BL was necessary, though with the benefit of hindsight the split lines may not have been the best choice. We of course lost our heavy truck manufactures to DAF. Though to be fair they did continue to produce in the UK.
The British aircraft Corporation which took control of the car division, should have been more radical in applying quality assurance methodologies, but failed or were prevented from doing so by labour relations. During this time the products did improve but never to the extent they should have done. Export opportunities were also lost, especially as the UK were a member of the EU, I suppose that having a home market that drives on the left, meant that designing product for the Left hand driving position was never taken as seriously as it should.
Ironically it was the fact that Japan and the Britain share the same driving position meant that we were always going to be an easy market for car makers from the land of the Rising Sun.
Honda had managed to turn around their European products from the dreadful rot boxes of the 70s to the ultra reliable models of the 80s with innovative engineering in the power plant But they still lacked a proper understanding of the European mind set of values.
Rover were struggling to develop new models and the link was established, Honda cars became significantly more Europeanised and successful and Rover benefited from sharing development costs and economies of scale. This symbiotic relationship was in danger of threatening the major European players, so much so that when the Rover 600 series was announced it was clearly seen as a threat to BMW.s medium sized market. This broadly coincided with BA's wish to dispose of Rover. BMW became very active in the takeover stakes.
It is widely known that Honda were more than just upset when BMW outbid them for control of Rover. Why did BMW do that? Rovers strengths plus the access that to Honda's shared technology were seen as very desirable, also the 600 series could be watered down to reduce the threat to BMW's major market.
Not withstanding BMW only controlling Rover for 5 years, in that time BMW was able to extract a lot of technological know how, cherrypick the key brands like mini, and drip feed Rover with the funds and access to new technologies to prevent them from really threatening BWM.
Note how BMW has introduced several smaller cars, and of course the X series has more than just a smattering of Range Rover.
Over this time BMW may have been outwardly appearing to support Rover but in reality they were applying a commercial strangle hold. It was not in their interests to have a strong UK manufacture, They knew that with the UK's relationship with the USA improving Rovers would undoubtedly begin to impact the American markets. National policies on interest rates also rested against UK manufacturing.
Effectively BMW asset stripped Rover, and although the manufacturing plant was sold to Phoenix for