After several months negotiations, the US' Ford Motor Company and Tata, a gigantic Indian car- and truck-maker, also the world's fifth-largest steel producer, jointly announced today, March 26th, that two prestigious Ford luxury automotive brands, Land Rover and Jaguar, have been purchased from Ford by Tata for $2.3 billion. Ford is expected to net somewhere around $1.3 billion. Ford purchased Jaguar in 1989 for $2.5 billion and they purchased Land Rover in 2000 for $2.85 billion. A $1.3 billion expected net on products which Ford bought for nearly $5 billion ... pretty rotten rate of return, don't you think? (Photos - Above, Important logos of record; Jaguar XKR; Below, late-model Rover at auto show).
Incidentally, Tata also gets the rights to some other well-known Brit-type names, including Rover
(by itself), Daimler (not the Teutonic one, the UK variety) and Lanchester, which I thought was a British WWII-era bomber, or an old-school Brit actress, first name Elsa. Turns out the name Lancaster is correct for both the bomber and Elsa. Lanchester-the-Brit-car produced its first model in 1895 and hasn't been heard from, new model-wise, since 1956; the name was owned by Jag, most-recently. Rover, the singular version, has had a round-about life since BMW bought the Rover group some 15 years ago, and then it came to be owned by Shanghai, China's SAIC car-making firm. Just to be safe, Ford bought back the rights to the Rover name to 'nip in the bud' any possible confusion over future models. (Photo - 1921 Lanchester 40-horsepower saloon, or 'sedan' to we Yanks; 1970 Daimler built for the Queen Mother; 2008 Land Rover).
Daimler, of the UK since 1896, and pronounced 'Dame'-ler', as opposed to Germany's 'Dime'ler', makes what looks to most of we Americans as the really big, really ugly and nearly all-glass versions of Rolls-Royces in which the "Royal Family" rides ... Well, they're not Rollers, they are Daimlers. Jaguar in the UK also used the Daimler name for their even more up-scale sedan versions known in the US as "Vanden Plas" or "Super 8" editions. The name does go back to some still-confusing business dealings between Gottlieb Daimler, who patented the first car in 1889, and Emil Jellinek, Daimler's most successful dealer (and whose daughter, "Mercedes," has gone onto great renown). OK, got all that? So Tata got five for the price of two. And remember --- We Americans are "citizens," while all Brits are mere "subjects."
The purchase should be complete by the end of 2008's second quarter. Tata said they foresee 
very few, if any, changes to the two companies in terms of the number of employees and the location of production, at least in the near-future. Tata recently came-on the world scene with their introduction, at the recent Delhi Auto Show, of a five-passenger, four-door car called Nano, set to sell for near $3,000 (dealer price in India: $2,500).
Jaguar, founded in 1922 as the Swallow Sidecar Company (hence the "SS" designation on some models throughout the years; though after WWII, with a large part of the German military also identified by the initials "SS," that part of the company's nomenclature was dropped for many years). The company's product was, as stated, motorcycle sidecars.
Two motorcycle enthusiasts, William Lyons and William Walmsley, created Swallow Sidecar, and the "SS Jaguar" name first appeared on a 2.5 litre sedan in 1935. The Jaguar name was given to the entire company in 1945. The "SS" confusion was similar to a problem the UK had with dogs called for many years "German Shepherds". The problems with the name were obvious; but from reading this post, you now know that the dog brand, uh, we mean breed, "Alsatian," was created as a replacement breed name for the "German" dogs.
Jaguar merged with the British Motor Corporation (BMC) and that holding company was eventually known
as British Motor Holdings (BMH) in 1966. After merging with Leyland, which had already taken over Rover, all of that became British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC) in 1968. In 1975, under what amounted to a forced nationalization of the company under Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher, it became British Leyland Ltd (later simply BL plc). In 1989, Ford bought Jaguar for $2.5 billion. Jaguar has never turned a profit for Ford. Jaguar Cars also holds "Royal Warrants" from both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles. (Photos --- Range Rover, inside and out, the high-end of the Land Rover brand).
Originally, the term "Land Rover" referred to one specific vehicle, a pioneering civilian all-terrain utility
vehicle launched on April 30, 1948, at the Amsterdam Motor Show. "Land Rover" was later used as a brand-name for several distinct models, all four-wheel drive, and all heavily dependent on the use of alu-min-ium, as our Brit cousins say. Why the "industry-first" heavy use of aluminum? Because there were hundreds of wrecked carcasses of airplanes throughout the UK; the planes were British, American and German, and most all of them were made mostly of aluminum. Call it smart minds thinking alike, call it early recycling, but it resulted in the manufacture of these mostly-aluminum Land Rovers, something which happens to this day, though the aluminum comes from other sources, but it remains a vehicle feature which contributes to its high price.
Starting out as part of The Rover Car Company, Land Rovers were designed and manufactured as a range of four-wheel drive vehicles under a succession of owners, much like Jaguar was, including British Leyland, British Aerospace and BMW. In 2000, the marque was sold by BMW to Ford, and both Jaguar and Land Rover became part of Ford's Premier Automotive Group (PAG). (Photo - Jaguar "Super 8" rear interior).
PAG, headquartered in a "made-to-order" five-story office building designed and owned by Ford in Irvine, California, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, has been gutted, personnel-wise,inside and out. Any Ford employees, blue- and white-collar, have been either let go from the company, been bought-out by the company, or, if they are lucky enough, were able to keep their jobs, but were severely punished, having to move back to one of the coldest environments in the USA, lovely, downtown Dearborn, Michigan.
Land Rover ranked last on the JD Power Vehicle Dependability Survey for 2005. LR tied for last (with 
Hummer and Porsche) in the 2006 Consumer Reports car reliability survey. It was only one of 6 makes that did not have a model whose reliability was "Good" or above; its highest-rating car was the LR3, which got a rating of "Poor". Also, LR ranked second-to-last in the 2007 Consumer Reports car reliability survey. In that same survey, the LR3/Discovery with a V8 engine was ranked the second least reliable SUV in the midsized category. It also was ranked as one of the 3 least reliable vehicles over the last 10 years in 2007 (again, in Consumer Reports). In fact, the JD Power surveys which included Jaguars have become a famous jumping-off point for tracking the improvement of cars and trucks sold in the US. As Jaguar went, over the course of almost two decades, from "worst" to "best" in various measured categories, the Power company proved the importance and validity of their surveys, which quickly became the most-efficient subjective quality tests in the auto industry. In fact, most analysts will say that Power's methodologies were the best things which ever happened to the auto business; thanks to them, there actually are "bases" which car-buyers can consider when shopping (and measuring, or surveying) one vehicle against another. (Photo Above --- 2006 Land Rover Freelander model; Below, 2008 Jaguar "Super 8").
Jaguar's rankings in various consumer surveys did improve after its purchase by Ford, especially when it came to engines. Land Rover's use of a new engine in many of their most-recent models was a step in the right direction; previous to this new motor's introduction, Land Rover depended on an old Buick V8 drivetrain, with plenty of low-end torque, but it was terribly, even infamously, unreliable.
Both Jaguar and Land Rover were constantly bedeviled, for many decades, by that worst offense of all: intermittent electrical problems. These gremlins seemed to improve after the Ford purchase. However, and not altogether surprisingly, Jaguar eventually ranked much higher than Land Rover in most all of the most-recent quality surveys, mostly because Ford had owned Jaguar for a much longer time than they had Land Rover. In fact, Jaguar was often listed as the "most improved" brand in many of these surveys, conducted by JD Power or not. (Photo --- 2008 Jaguar "Super 8" front interior; most annoying thing in the car is the rustling of the leather).
A friend of mine once wrote that the interior of even the latest Land Rovers looked "more like an unfinished 
high school metal shop project" than that of the interior of a high-priced, luxurious, go-anywhere, do-anything 4x4. Especially one with a base price starting at $38,000 and going up, seemingly non-stop, as high as $81,850 (high-end of that final base price being $125,000).
In 2000, Ford bought Land Rover for $2.85 billion, and by that time the marque was owned by BMW, completing the German company's break-up of the Rover group, and, in effect, killing-off the last vestiges of the British auto industry, excepting for super-luxury makes including Rolls-Royce, Daimler (the UK Daimler, not the Teutonic Daimler) and Bentley; none of those companies are owned by UK-based corporations.
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