no ittention to build Rover car, they will keep it only.

Ford seems try to avoid from selling any of its PAG's brand especially Volvo & Land Rover. Ford should stop rebadge Ford's vehicle as Mercury.

possibility rumours around US that Ford & GM will merge in near future.

maybe we will see more drastic decision etc. Ford to ripped off Mercury brand.

don wan see it suffering in da hands of da chinese.

Jaguar and Aston are niche products. Low volumn image builders. They are practically loss leaders, but there for a reason.

Cars that save ford are the bread and butter Focuses (Foci?), Ford 500, Windstar, and F-Series Trucks. Majority of these cater for the North American Market. And as of late, the NA market is a little on the dry side, which explains the slump. Doesn;t affect only Ford…DC, GM, Honda, Toyota and the rest are getting hit as well. Only one doing relatively well is Hyundai/Kia..no surprises there though.

For example, last month (8/06) Ford managed to sell 76,804 F-Series pickups alone in USA (Same month in 2005, Ford pushed out over 90k F-Series). This is 2x more than the the total new vehicle purchases in Malaysia.

The UK is a small market. They might use the MG brand to penetrate certain markets as a test, failure wont contamintate the bigger band name. You can see where that is going. China has a weird appitite for car brands. GM seems to be doing fairly well with the Buick nameplate despite the fact, GM nearly killed the brand in North America but instead gettign rid of Oldsmobile.

Malaysia is a minute market. Most of us are not exposed to the dynamics of a large mature automotive market so some of these strategies may make little sense to us.

As for Lotus. They are doing well because they are allowed to do what they do best. Previous management got it in thier thick heads to make Lotus profitable, which made things worst. Lucky Proton has gotten that msg clear.

OT : Looks like GM is getting the hint and jumping in the bandwagon buying up DRB-HICOM shares and might bring in more Chevy/Deawoo models.

its losing hundreds of millions and now only they are thinking of acquiring Rover?

Rover is a brand name that won't bloster sales either, if jaguar and aston martin isn't goin to save Ford, how on earth could a brand which is like Proton to the British, save Ford.

Ford's problem is the American car market. But buying a brand lik Rover won't solve anything.

The Brits are good at making some fine cars but it's so unfortunate that they can't sustain a good business behind a brand.

Question is, why didn't they get the Rover brandname earlier? Why do they wait until SAIC change their plans?

p/s bring the Focus st here la…or you want msian to buy the old foocus and tranplant the S80 engine and rebadge Focus ST80/type R/wrc/McRae Edition

P/S nobody will try to take over this make…all puke