Why did mg rover go bust?
Its a long story. Part of it goes back to the years of British Leyland and Government ownership, when the products were poorly developed, and not designed with export markets in mind. This left the company with a legacy of poorly developed products, and a strong reliance on the UK market. Then there is the BMW ownership period, when the Rover 75 was developed with a German idea of Britishness, which didn’t appeal to the British, who saw it as twee, or to the Germans, who wanted German products. The 75 was also compromised by being carefully developed with no sportiness, in case it should steal sales from BMW’s 3-series and 5-series. When BMW sold MG Rover to the Phoenix consortium, they did not include the part-completed designs for the new models under development to replace the 25 and 45, leaving the new owners with one recent model (the 75) and three models nearing replacement age (the 25, 45 and MGF). The new owners made a few good decisions in developing the MG ZR, ZS and ZT model
