Of all the manufacturers in the world, why did MG Rover chose the Tata Indica as the replacement for the Rover Metro??
When MG Rover were presented with a proposal to sell the Indica V2, they recognised that it could have much potential as a new small Rover in the UK and Europe – especially considering the fact that their dealers had been crying out for a replacement for the Metro/100 since it had been killed off in 1997. Although, the Rover 25 had been repositioned to fight in the supermini market, and the entry-level model had been brought down to a 1.1-litre version of the K-Series, buyers did not identify with it as a town car in quite the same way they did the Metro/100. And that was the thing – the Metro/100 may have had many, many faults towards the end of its life, but it still had the advantage of being perfectly sized for those looking for a city car for one. The result was sadly inevitable – when the Rover 100 died, buyers did not turn to the 200 – and the drop in sales for the company between 1997 and 1999 almost coincided with the loss of the company’s small car.
With the Indica, the company saw the opportunity to recreate the Metro, without dipping into vital financial resources. The fact that it was contemporary and stylish was a bonus…
A deal with TATA was quickly reached, and essentially it boiled down to this:
· * MG Rover would adjust the styling without changing any of the body pressings. This would allow bumpers and other body addenda to be re-styled by Peter Stevens' design team.
· * MG Rover would have freedom to adjust the chassis settings in order to tune the Indica to be more suitable for the UK and Europe’s roads.
· * Economics dictated that the car would need to be built in India, and then reverse-imported.
A quick programme to adjust the car better to suit the demands of European buyers was instigated, and the marketing people knuckled down to the unenviable task of deciding just what they were going to call the new car.
Naming it was always going to be difficult, because on one hand, it was always going to be difficult to justify adding the Rover nameplate to a car that was produced so far away from the UK. In the past, Austin Rover may have had similar misgivings over the branding of the Triumph Acclaim and the first generation Rover 200, but they bit the bullet anyway, and success soon followed. The difficulty, however, with the TATA produced car was that it was replacing the Metro/100, and although in latter years it was a fully paid up member of the Rover family, it was still very much known as a “Metro” rather than a “Rover” and was therefore something of a model in its own right.
Read the rest of the story here : Why MG Rover chose the Indica?