John Cranage, Birmingham Post, 23rd June, 2009 Jaguar Land Rover is one of six car manufacturers putting their expertise behind a West Midland project to pioneer the development of mass low carbon transport. The scheme, which is launched in Birmingham today, will see more than 100 battery, hydrodgen-powered and hybrid cars tested on the region’s [...]

Howard Wheeldon, Birmingham Post, 22nd June, 2009 With Government assistance still not getting through to the manufacturers, Howard Wheeldon, the Senior Strategist at BGC Partners, asks whether it is time to start writing the obituary of the UK premium car industry Three months after the Government belatedly launched what it called a £2.3 billion Automotive [...]

Birmingham Post, 19th June, 2009 A Welsh-based group of former Jaguar Land Rover executives is bidding to rescue LDV from extinction – with a pledge to keep jobs in Birmingham by developing new green vans. Low carbon technology specialists Connaught Engineering Limited, based near Llanelli, have become the first would-be buyer from nine who have [...]

Jon Griffin, Birmingham Post, 18th June, 2009 Hopes that LDV could rise from the ashes have risen with up to nine firms already throwing their hats in the ring for the collapsed van maker. The prospect of a takeover at the mothballed Washwood Heath plant grew after the Administrators revealed that the firms had signed [...]

Robert Leitch Saab Automobile AB really does seem to be returning to Swedish ownership a little less than twenty years after GM took a 50% stake in the carmaking component of the Saab-Scania conglomerate. Many of us will think back to May 2000, when, putting a brave face on many uncertainties, the UK once again had [...]

Steven Ward   A text message arrived last week: Bugatti Owners Club, visiting the Farm, Tue Morn. Let me expand, a friend of mine who owns a restaurant has recently opened a B&B-cum-restaurant-cum-coffee shop near Hawes on the stunning North Yorkshire moors. In the past, I’d suggested that owner’s clubs are a valuable source of [...]

Clive Goldthorp   AROnline’s regular readers may recall that, when we last wrote about the dispute between MG Sports and Racing Europe Limited and Nanjing Automobile (Group) Corporation in November, 2008 (MG X POWER: The IPO’s Hearing Officer delivers his decision), we had been unable to contact the former company’s Managing Director, William Riley, for his [...]

Joe Leahy, FT.com, 11th June, 2009 Late last month Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) released what appeared to be a routine announcement to the stock exchange. N. Chandrasekaran, Chief Operating Officer of Tata Consultancy Services, was to succeed the Chief Executive Officer, S. Ramadorai, when he stood down in October from his post as head of [...]

Graeme Brown, Birmingham Post, 11th June, 2009 Insolvent van maker LDV is to reopen its gates today – just three days after going bust – to help hundreds of workers try to cope with redundancy. Public agencies from across the West Midlands are joining forces over the next two days to reopen the famous Washwood [...]

Jonathan Walker, Birmingham Post, 11th June, 2009 Jaguar Land Rover is set to axe vital research and development projects because the Government’s heavily-hyped scheme to help car makers get loans has failed to provide a penny to any manufacturer, six months after it was launched. Union leaders told the a Commons inquiry that JLR was [...]

Land Rover’s MY10 Range Rover at Motorexpo 2009Land Rover gave the MY10 Range Rover, MY10 Range Rover Sport and new Discovery 4 their UK launch at Motorexpo 2009 which opened yesterday in London’s Canary Wharf and, in addition, announced price and specification details for the revised Range Rover. The latest Range Rover offers a choice of two all-new engines [...]

John Cranage, Birmingham Post, 9th June, 2009 The tangled story of crashed vanmaker LDV took a new twist when it emerged that Malaysian company Weststar was bidding to buy the Birmingham business out of administration. Weststar precipitated the lastest crisis last week when it pulled out of a last-ditch deal that could have seen the [...]

Tom Scotney, Birmingham Post, 8th June, 2009 More than 800 people have lost their jobs at collapsed Birmingham van maker LDV after Administrators said they would be cutting back to a skeleton staff just hours after being appointed at the stricken firm.   Rob Hunt, Mark Hopkins and Matthew Hammond from PricewaterhouseCoopers were put in charge [...]

John Cranage, Birmingham Post, 8th June, 2009 Jaguar reverted to 1960s psychedelia to disguise the look of this very 21st century car.   Painted in swirling black and white shapes designed to disguise its body lines, this pre-production version of the company’s new flagship XJ luxury sports saloon was photographed on the road somewhere in [...]

Jon Griffin, Birmingham Post, 8th June, 2009 LDV today collapsed into administration following a six-month production standstill – putting 4,000 UK jobs at risk. An application by the Directors of the Birmingham van maker for administration was granted at Birmingham County Court by His Honour Judge Purle, QC. The courtroom move effectively leaves the future [...]

Lindsay Chappell, Automotive News, 5th June, 2009 Tata Motors, the Indian automaker that owns Jaguar and Land Rover, plans to bring the car known as the world’s cheapest to the United States within three years. David Good, a U.S. representative for Tata, confirmed statements made by Chairman Ratan Tata at a Cornell University forum this [...]

Hopefully, by the time you have read this, you should have tried navigating to the forum to get your daily fix and found that it’s up and running. Yes, everyone, after a painful database migration and script upgrade, the board is working. You should also notice a little surprise when you get on there too… [...]

Ash Sutcliffe, China Car Times, 4th June, 2009 These Roewe 150 spy shots made it onto the internet early this morning, complete with an ‘artist’s rendering’ of what the finished product may look like. Previous ’spy shots’ of a Roewe 250 showed a Fiat Punto with some wires hanging out from under the hood, although [...]

George Gao, Gasgoo.com, 2nd June, 2009 Geely Holding Group Company Limited (Geely Group) is set to launch its Shanghai Englon TX4 car next week, said sina.com today. This is the first new model of Geely’s luxury sub-brand Shanghai Englon. The Shanghai Englon TX4, an updated version of the famed London Taxi (now controlled by Geely), is [...]

Birmingham Post, 5th June, 2009 Managers at van maker LDV have issued a last-ditch plea to the Government to help rescue the company or see thousands of jobs axed at a huge cost to the economy. The Birmingham-based business is set to apply for administration on Monday after a rescue deal collapsed when Malaysian firm [...]