The British MG Rover group may soon be no more, the company has ceased manufacture of their MG and Rover cars while they are placed in administration facing huge losses. The MG Rover Group are the last British owned volume car manufacture to produce cars in the UK to close.

The company can trace its roots back to the 1800s. The first Rover car was manufactured in 1901 and by the 1970s the group has merged with other British manufactures like Morris, Riley, Austin, Triumph, Wolseley and Jaguar. Poor management of the company has been one of the companies biggest problems since the late 60s, in 1975 the company, know as British Leyland, was propped up by the British government when it was facing failure and many of its brands were cut when several factories were closed. The cutbacks did improve the companies’ fortunes and the 1980s saw the now renamed Austin Rover Group saw the company able to keep its head above water with many of its cars using licensed designs from Honda.

1988 saw the British government sell the company to British Aerospace who then sold it to BMW by 1994. BMW placed huge investment in the company designing all new models like the successful 75 and MG, an updated Land rover range and the new Mini but BMW started to see that rover was a very costly company to run so it split the company in three selling the profitable Landrover to ford and keeping the mini for themselves. Rover and MG were sold to a group called the Phoenix Consortium for 10 pounds. Without the successful product lines of mini or landrover the new MG Rover group had to rely on their existing rover and mg products to make a profit and without a huge amount of capital to invest into new designs Phoenix needed to find another investor but unfortunately the only serious offer by China’s Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation was not allowed to go ahead because China’s government wouldn’t let them to invest in the failing company.

On the 15th of April MG Rover was placed into administration and the factory that once made the legendary Mini fell silent. It is unknown if anyone else would be interested in reviving production of either MG or Rover.