The Rover's Return?
by Ross Finlay (08 Dec 99)

Rover - now being firmly promoted as part of the BMW Group - has its supermini for the start of the new century in place. The 25 is a modest-budget update of the previous 200, although there are many more improvements than a glance at the exterior, with its revised front and rear styling to match the 75, suggests.

Most of the body panels have been carried over, and so has much of the interior. But the 25 looks fine, if familiar, thanks partly to some more imaginative road wheels. The 200 cabin was pretty good in detail, and the 25 builds on that with revised trim materials and colour schemes. If you know the 200, though, you know the 25, because this is nothing like an all-new design.

Rover has improved the engine choice. By the middle of next year there will be seven different power units, with the entry-level K-series 1100 being the last of them to appear.

For the moment, the catalogue includes a 1.4-litre in 82 and 101bhp stages of tune, a 106bhp 1.6 which seems quite a small step-up, a 114bhp 1.8 which comes only in the models fitted with Steptronic CVT, a 99bhp two-litre turbo diesel, and a rousing MGF-style 1.8-litre VVC, with 142bhp on tap, for the GTi.

Lower entry prices will come with next year's 1.1-litre models, already announced as costing from £8295 for the three-door hatchback. For now, they start at £9395 for the 82bhp 1.4, £11,495 for the 101bhp version, £12,645 for the 1.6, £13,645 for the 1.8 Steptronic, £11,895 for the turbo diesel, and £14,995 for the GTi.

Various trim and equipment levels are available at each stage, apart from the on-its-own GTi. For five-door bodywork, available on all models including the GTi, add £500.

Rover makes no bones about the fact that this is a premium priced supermini. Neither is it trying to kid anybody that it won't have to work very hard to build on its lowest-in-modern-times market share.

At the launch near Shrewsbury, most of us were flabbergasted when one of our number suggested to some high-ranking Rover people that the company's plight was due in considerable degree to the bad things the media have been saying about it.

Look, no journalist I know of really wants Rover to go down the plumbing, although the way it operated until recently had a few hands reaching tentatively for the chain. But the latest Anglo-German, or more accurately German-Anglo management seems to be doing its best to haul round what was previously a badly run, poorly equipped, basket-case enterprise.

Rover Cars now has a clearly defined role within the BMW Group: to concentrate on the lower medium sector of the market, persevere with front-wheel drive, which BMW reckons is not its own thing, and jack up its export sales. And dealers have sunk something like £250m into new premises and uprated dealership facilities.

Is the 25 going to help them recoup their investment? What worries some of us is that, like the 45 coming along soon, this is a revised version of a car which had already been in the catalogue for several years.

But it looks well, feels solidly built, has a much more up-market cabin than several, although not all, of its direct rivals. Engines have been updated, and the chassis engineers have given the 25 a generally more sporting feel. In fact, the new cars stress handling rather than ride.

At the end of the day, management, marketing and dealer input do only so much. The rest depends on how potential owners work out the equation: 200 divided by eight equals what, exactly?

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