Jaguar and Land Rover will soon be owned by Tata, the gigantic Indian car- and truck-maker,
thrust into world view when they introduced their 'Nano' $2,500 (wholesale) four-door, five-passenger sedan at the recent auto show in Delhi. Ford announced several weeks ago that Tata was the preferred buyer for their two UK-based luxury vehicle manufacturers. In the past few days, a flurry of newswire stories detailing the history and success of Tata, led many to believe, correctly, that an announcement from Ford and Tata about the Jag-Land Rover deal was imminent. Today, February 25th, industry weekly Automotive News reported that "Tata Motors will announce its purchase of Jaguar Land Rover on March 5th or 6th."
Ford Motor Company (FoMoCo), like General Motors and the recently privatized Chrysler Corporation is suffering from huge losses and slow sales. The US economy, close to recession, is slamming car and truck sales as many potential car-buyers are having trouble making their house payments, and rents are rising as many people who have lost their homes are suddenly finding themselves back in the rental market. Rental property owners are taking advantage of the situation by raising rents across the board throughout the country. (Photos - Above, The 2000 Jaguar XKR 100, a classic supercharged British drophead coupe, and below, the 2004 Jaguar F1 car driven by Mark Webber; the new 'Force India' F1 team may benefit by bringing some Jaguar engineers and much telemetric and testing information to India).
The head of Nissan/Renault, Carlos Ghosn, said last week that he thinks the US automotive marketplace is already in a recession. Ghosn said growth in countries such as Russia, China, India and Brazil will be key to the industry's worldwide revival, and also said that Russia will surpass Germany in the next two years as Europe's largest auto market.
This Website has been stating the obvious (at least to us) for years: That the world's auto-making companies are continuing a westward movement which began shortly after 1886, the year Karl Benz was issued a patent on the "Motorwagen" he built in 1885, the world's first commercial automobile, powered by a single-cylinder four-stroke engine. This great industry, which had humble beginnings in Europe, quickly moved west across the Atlantic to the US. Detroit was king from the 1930s through the 1970s, then the world began to look farther west, to Japan and, quickly, to South Korea for its newest cars and trucks. And it continues to move west, with China and India the next giants; the industry will continue its westward drift, moving into the Middle East, Russia and the East Asian countries over the next 50 years.
January 9th, the day before Tata introduced the Nano at the Delhi Auto Show, the veddy, veddy British FINANCIAL TIMES ran a story on Tata's then-"possible" purchase of Jag and Land Rover from FoMoCo. We found it interesting and thought you might, too ... So here goes:
"Ratan Tata said on Wednesday that his Tata Group would make a better owner of Jaguar and Land Rover than Ford, dismissing concerns that the lower-end carmaker would add little value to the luxury marques. (Photo - Land Rover carries the heritage of the UK, as does India itself ... Many Americans who enjoyed the TV series, "The Jewel in the Crown", probably thinks India is still a UK colony).
"A lot of people have been making an issue of whether a car manufacturer that's in the low end can also 
integrate with an upper-end luxury car enterprise . . . that assumes one is going to integrate the enterprise," chairman Mr. Tata told the Financial Times.
Speaking a day before he was due to unveil Tata's keenly awaited "People's Car", Mr. Tata said the lack of any overlap between Jaguar and Land Rover and Tata's existing range of lower-cost passenger cars, buses and commercial vehicles would be a positive advantage. (That "People's Car" is the Nano, which we've given extensive coverage on this Website; we all could have done without the FT's somewhat Hitler-ian "People's Car" reference).
"A company like ours would probably be the company that would have less conflict with these products than Ford may have had, whether it be in areas of overlap or conflict," he said.
But Tata has faced criticism over its interest in the marques from analysts who believe that it should stick to its forte' as a specialist in low-cost vehicles for emerging markets.
There has also been a backlash against a Tata takeover of the brands from US car dealers, with Ken Gorin, Jaguar Business Operations Council's chairman, reportedly arguing that the US public was not "ready for ownership out of India of a luxury car brand such as Jaguar".
But Mr. Tata said many large multinationals owned brands across the demographic spectrum and managed them separately as part of a wide-ranging portfolio." -30- (end of FT story)
(Photo - Mr. Tata introduces the Nano at the most-recent Delhi Auto Show; Nano is a four-door, five-passenger car which sells to dealers for $2,500, while most consumers will pay nearer to $3,000 a unit, still a very impressive product ... Though the wisdom of making a vehicle with a traditional gasoline-burning internal combustion engine widely available in a developing nation has been rightly questioned, and it will take years to know the answer).
Here's what we want to know: Who is this idiot "Ken Gorin"? His kind of Ugly American-ism went out of style, oh, about 30 years ago. To say to a journalist that the US public is not "ready for ownership out of India of a luxury car brand such as Jaguar" is the same type of boorish and obnoxious jingoism which has made us so many "friends" around the world these past few years. Someone should smack Mr. Gorin upside the head, then get him a Berlitz book on the many hundreds of languages of India ...
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