Blunder Buses: Rover CityRover

The car they were tweaking was a simple front-drive supermini, designed for Tata by Italy’s IDEA institute and already a piece of technological history. There were a few pluses, though – its 1.4-litre Peugeot-derived motor was more powerful than average for the class, and the Indica was roomier too, its height and upright seating arrangements yielding a lot more room than a Ka could muster. The Tata’s bodyshell was toughened for the onslaught of India’s roads, its long-travel suspension girded for pothole action. Though not Britain’s motorway network.

MG Rover’s fast-withering budget afforded a few engineering changes, all effected at Tata’s Pune Indica plant, including upgraded engine mounts, bigger 14in wheels, substantially stiffened springs, a lower ride height, more negative camber front and rear and a quicker steering ratio. MG Rover’s engineering department had also reworked the distinctly poor gearchange, but that improvement failed to reach Pune.

Yet these upgrades would mean nothing in the face of a major change of tack as the CityRover’s launch date neared. Daniel Ward, then MG Rover’s communications director, explains: ‘MG Rover was given £400 million by BMW when the company was formed in 2000, but it was losing £150 million a year.’ By late 2003 the company was close to running out of cash, resorting to tactics such as selling the Longbridge plant and leasing it back, and off-loading its parts business to Caterpillar to raise enough cash to stay afloat.

These manoeuvres bought time while the company sought collaboration with another manufacturer – any manufacturer – that might give it a more robust future and the means to realise its plans. At the core of these was the so-called new medium car, previewed as the Rover TCV at the 2002 Geneva show. A genuinely new model was little more than a distant wish by this point, however. What MG Rover desperately needed, right now, was a way of generating revenue.

Had the CityRover been launched at its intended base price of £4995 its value would have been hard to resist. But late in the day MG Rover’s MD Kevin Howe jacked it up to £6500, making this reworked Indica a decidedly less enticing prospect. That was for the basic Solo version, which bought you a solitary airbag and a radio-cassette player. Sprite and Select intermediate trims sat beneath the top-of-the-heap CityRover Style, which provided power steering, four electric windows and air conditioning, alloys, a roof spoiler and strong burst of cognitive dissonance when you realised that you could have bought a decent Ford Fiesta for the same money.

Howe and colleagues were criticised for this late and hefty price hike, but as Ward says now, ‘Howe saw the balance sheet. He needed the money.’ He also needed sales volume, but at these new prices sales in the anticipated low tens of thousands were simply not going to materialise. By the end of 2004, 13 months after the CityRover was launched with minimal marketing (cashflow, again) just over 5000 had been sold. Little more than three months later MG Rover went into receivership, on 6 April 2005.

Yet this wasn’t quite the end of the CityRover’s troubled British career. An improved version was on the way to revitalise sales; a ship was literally at sea with the first batch of 300 when MG Rover went under. They were eventually sold via receivers PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which negotiated a deal with car supermarket Motorpoint. They had little trouble shifting another 900-odd when the starting price was dropped to a decidedly more realistic £3999. All of which meant that this new improved version went on sale after its maker’s demise, a very rare and unwanted logistical first for the CityRover. The final tally was 8666 sales – far from enough to keep MG Rover afloat, but good business for Motorpoint.

It also meant the end of what might have been a productive partnership between Tata Motors and MG Rover, the teams from both companies apparently getting on well, not least because they shared a similar sense of humour according to one insider.

The most dramatic of these was to create a new MG Midget, a model that would surely have been the cheapest sports car on sale in Britain. You can read all about that on The Intercooler soon.

Meanwhile, of those 8666 CityRovers a mere 110 are licensed today, another 486 on SORN. The few on sale usually cost little more than £1000. In the unlikely event that you find yourself hankering after one – it’ll be fine Festival of the Unexceptional fodder when it’s old enough – try to find one of the Motorpoint Mk2s, and a version with electric windows. Might as well treat yourself.