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player ready...Inspector Morse tooled around Oxford in a Mark II. When former Prime Minister Tony Blair pulled out of Downing Street for the final time last year, it was in the back seat of a Jaguar.
There have been Lotuses and Triumphs, Aston Martins and MGs, but no vehicle has epitomized the once-legendary British motor industry like that most English of cars, the powerful, sultry Jaguar. Except that for almost 18 years, Jaguar has been owned by Ford Motor Co. of Detroit. And that the brand is being acquired by another vestige of Britain’s long-ago colonies.
India’s Tata Group is taking off Ford’s hands not only Jaguar but also Land Rover, the British matron of sport-utility vehicles that Queen Elizabeth II has been known to drive.
The import of one of India’s muscular conglomerates riding to the rescue of British legends — and paying around $2 billion to do so — isn’t lost on either side of the ex-empire.
The Tata deal, which was announced Wednesday, “has made us all proud,” said Debashis Chakraborty, a government official in Calcutta, the onetime capital of the British Raj.
In Britain the reaction has been mixed, with optimism that Tata Chief Executive Ratan Tata would be able to help restore the brand to its former pre-eminence and faint regret that it may take an Indian giant to do the job.
It probably helps the British attitude that Tata is no stranger to preserving British brands. The company owns the United Kingdom’s biggest steel company, Corus, which includes the former British Steel, as well as Tetley Tea (which British observers note with some satisfaction was not merged into Tata Tea, the largest tea manufacturer in India).
A cash-hungry Ford
In 1989, British car enthusiasts saw Ford’s purchase of Jaguar as a lifesaver that averted the brand’s near-certain extinction under British ownership. The latest top-end models executed under Ford management have been widely celebrated: The new XF, with its 2.7-liter, V6 twin-turbo diesel was named Car of the Year 2008 in Britain’s What Car? awards.
The critical successes came on the tail end of years of lackluster financial performance and Ford’s ill-fated experimentation with its X-type introductory-level luxury car.
Land Rover prospered under Ford, with worldwide sales rising 18 percent last year as Jaguar’s shrank by a similar proportion, but cash-hungry Ford wanted to sell both. The automaker lost $2.67 billion in 2007 and $12.6 billion in 2006, and it recently unloaded Aston Martin, another premier British automobile brand, to a Kuwaiti-funded investor group for $848 million.
Ford is expected to continue supplying engines, while Tata would maintain British management teams and three existing production plants in Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as two engineering and design studios.
Tata’s challenges
Tata could succeed where Ford faltered by concentrating less on volume and more on restoring Jaguar’s allure as a car people spend the first part of their lives dreaming to own and the rest paying for — a new XF typically costs upward of $49,000, and Jaguar’s supercharged V8 coupe, the XK, can command more than $86,700.
Tata could help reverse Jaguar’s flagging sales not only by taking the brand back upmarket but also by exploring affluent new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia.
From Tata’s side, access to British plants, engineering and supply networks will allow a company stuck making the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, to shave years off its graduation into sedans.
“They’re cutting down on that 10- to 15-year gap of their going forward,” said Amit Kasat, an auto industry analyst with Motilal Oswal in Mumbai. “It’s very much clear that they want to take the Tata brand globally. This is another step.”