Last week there were news reports here about where BMW might build their
Rolls Royce factory. Knowing that Volkswagen had beaten BMW in the
purchase of the Rolls Royce automobile company, it took me a little while
to look up what everyone else probably knows: VW got the company, but the
trademark was owned by the entirely seperate RR aerospace company.
Anyway, VW own Rolls Royce, the car company; but after 2002 cannot sell
cars with the RR nameplate. (They will still sell them, they will just
have to be called something else.) BMW own Rolls Royce, the car
trademark, and will be selling a new Rolls Royce (of British manufacture,
probably using workers from the old RR London factory) from 2003.
The european business news is uniform in its assesment that BMW got the
better end of the deal, and that VW really messed up. So according to the
Financial Times, et al; the customer's perception of the brand image,
character, and history is much more important than the atual
technological lineage and character of the product.
We may not like what BMW is doing to our British brands, but BMW is doing
it to protect themselves from the same fate -- they see what is happening
to Saab, Volvo, Jaguar, etc., and are trying discourage any outside
takeover of BMW by becoming big enough that the cost of takeover is
greater than the specific value of the BMW brand. They apparently like
building cars to their own specification, and want to continue to do so.
>> someone wrote:
>> > Page 6 talks about the 'MG brand', the MGF and finishes by ....
>someone else wrote:
>> There was a rather long feature article on BMW and it's purchase of
>> Rover in last weeks New York Times. The article also mentioned pretty
>> much the same thing about bring the MG back to the US.
and yet someone else wrote:
>Wouldn't surprise me if they (BMRoverW) would carry their
>badge-engineering plans a bit further and offer their "Millennium"
>aboMINIation with Austin, Morris, MG, Triumph or Riley decals, with
>different grills for each "marque." ;)
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