Rover History:
Incidentally, the first Rover was a tricycle manufactured by Starley & Sutton Co of Coventry, England in 1883. The company was founded by John Kemp Starley and William Sutton in 1878. Starley had formerly worked with his uncle James who began in manufacturing sewing machines and switched to bicycles in 1869.In 1889 the company became J. K. Starley & Co. Ltd and in the late 1890s, the Rover Cycle Company Ltd. Three years after Starleysdeath in 1901, the Rover Company began producing automobiles with the two-seater Rover Eight to the designs of Edmund Lewis who came from Daimler. During world war two, the company together with Frank Whittle embarked on building gas turbine engines, a request that was tabled by the British government. In 1950, designer F. R. Bell and Chief Engineer Maurice Wilks unveiled the first car powered with a gas turbine engine. The two-seater JET1 had the engine positioned behind the seats, air intake grilles on either side of the car and exhaust outlets on the top of the tail. During tests, the car reached top speeds of 88 mph (140 km/h), at a turbine speed of 50,000 rpm.In 1967, Rover became part of the Leyland Motor Corporation, which merged with the British Motor Holdings to become British Leyland. In 1979, British Leyland began a long relationship with Honda Motor Company of Japan. The result was a cross-holding structure where Honda took a 20 percent stake in the company while the company took a 20 percent stake in HondasU.K. subsidiary. Austin Rover Group was formed in 1982 as the mass-market car-manufacturing subsidiary of BL. In the 1980s, the slimmed-down BL used the Rover badge on a range of cars co-developed with Honda. The 1994 takeover by BMW saw the development of the Rover 75, before the infamous sell-off in 2000.

Rover Overview:
Rover was a British automobile manufacturer and later a marque based at the former Austin Longbridge plant in Birmingham. In recent years, it was part of BMW and the MG Rover Group. However, in April 2005, production stopped when the company became insolvent. In July 2005, the Nanjing Automobile Group acquired the assets, with plans to resume production in China and at Longbridge, in 2007. On September 18, 2006, Ford bought the rights to the Rover name from BMW for approximately £6 million. Ford had acquired an option of first refusal to buy the Rover brand because of its purchase of Land Rover from BMW in 2000.

Other Rover Details:
In 2000, Rover was split into three parts: the MINI marque was retained by BMW; Land Rover was sold to Ford for an estimated sum of £1.8 billion; the rest became MG Rover, and was bought for a nominal £10 in May 2000 by a specially assembled group of businesspersons known as the Phoenix Consortium. Ex-Rover Chief Executive John Towers headed the consortium. The four businessmen who took control of the newly formed MG Rover Group. The company continued as the MG Rover Group but production ceased on April 15th 2005, when it was declared insolvent. On 22 July 2005, the assets of the collapsed firm were sold to the Nanjing Automobile Group for £53m.