The UK Government has confirmed a grant offer of up to £27 million is to be made available to Land Rover for the production of an all-new car. The company is due to make a final decision on the the go-ahead of the project at its award-winning plant in Halewood, on Merseyside, later this year. The car would be [...]

Keith Adams The mood at Geneva was strange – the manufacturers seemed bold, unveiling a barrage of concepts and interesting new models, but the number of press representatives there was well down on last year (or so it seemed to us), and the specialists were reporting ‘tough times.’ Despite that, there was new metal – [...]

Keith Adams Spent a lovely day at the Geneva Motor Show last Tuesday – and, funnily enough, found myself poring over what a friend likes to call the ‘tat hall’. It’s the area of the show that the world’s media seems to overlook (in the rush for the latest new car launches) but for enthusiasts [...]

John Cranage, Birmingham Post, 5th March, 2009 Jaguar sales more than doubled in February as the rest of the UK car industry stayed in negative territory. Figures from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders this morning showed that registrations of new cars fell by 22 per cent to 54,359 last month and were 28 [...]

Alun Thorne, Birmingham Post, 5th March, 2009 The transformation has started at the former Jaguar plant at Browns Lane in Coventry, which is set to be the site of a £10million redevelopment by Advantage West Midlands. The regional development agency took control of the site and plan to turn it into an employment magnet creating [...]

John Reed in Geneva, Financial Times, 4th March, 2009 India’s Tata Motors plans to sell its much hyped low-cost model, the Nano, in Europe from 2011, and an electric car from next year. In a sign of its ambitions to break into the high end of the European market, Tata also plans to sell the Prima, [...]

Newspress has reported that Tata Motors Limited is preparing for a full-scale European launch – including the UK – in 2010, with both the tiny Nano city car and a fully-revised Indica B-segment hatchback – including an electric version. However, according to Newspress, the launch will not use the Rover brand – which Tata acquired through [...]

Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post, 4th March, 2009 The West Midlands automotive industry has taken a further blow with the announcement that job cuts are looming at MG in Longbridge. The Chinese-owned firm would not say how many jobs were set to disappear but a caller to the Birmingham Post reported that up to 30 positions were [...]

MG Motor UK Limited and SAIC Motor UK Technical Centre Limited (SMTC UK) are now sharing the Longbridge site as the Engineering and R&D company has completed a move from its Leamington offices into new premises on the site of the MG factory on Lowhill Lane. The move was an obvious, sensible and inevitable rationalisation [...]

John Cranage and Catherine Lillington, Birmingham Post, 4th March, 2009 Workers at beleaguered Birmingham vanmaker LDV have voted to accept a ten per cent pay cut as the fight to save the business goes on. The company’s 700-strong workforce is believed to have accepted management proposals to cut wages and production virtually unanimously at a [...]

A standard looking Austin 1300 MkII is nothing special you think? An original and completly unrestored one is surely a rare thing these days, finding one that had a Downton treatment and all the matching documents is close to a miracle… Tim Saunders has had previous experience with an ADO16, an early MG 1100, but [...]