JustBritish

A nice write up on the Aston Martin DBS over at Search Chicago Autos. Dan Jedlicka starts out by saying, “Some folks may consider the new $265,000 Aston Martin DBS too gorgeous to drive because it looks more like a million bucks.

But the shapely, mechanically advanced DBS coupe is designed to be driven daily, even if it can hit 191 mph with its hand-assembled 510-horsepower V-12 engine, said John Walton, vice president and general manager of Aston Martin North America at a recent media preview of the DBS here.”

Read more on the Seach Chicago Autos site.

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Car giant Ford has sold its luxury UK-based car brands Jaguar and Land Rover to Indian company Tata. Tata, India’s biggest vehicle maker, is paying $2.3bn for the British brands after months of negotiations over price and supply relationships. The irony of one time colonies buying and selling the automotive crown jewels Britain has not gone un-noticed.

The negotiations started last June when Ford announced its intention to sell the companies as a package. Jaguar and Land Rover employ about 16,000 staff at UK plants in the West Midlands and Merseyside.

Although Land Rover remains profitable, Ford has never managed to make money from its investment in Jaguar.

Ford has been forced to sell the two companies in order to concentrate on its loss-making core US car business, which it hopes to turn around in the next two years. It sold its Aston Martin marque to a UK-led investment consortium in a deal worth $955.2m last year after buying it in 1987.
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While I am as green as the next person, or maybe even more so, this just seems wrong on so many levels. The British cabinet is debating replacing their Jaguars with the hybrid Prius. As the Financial Times reports, “Gordon Brown’s cabinet clashed yesterday over whether to replace British-built ministerial cars with Japanese Toyota Prius hybrid vehicles, amid new evidence that the government is failing to live up to its green rhetoric. John Hutton, the business secretary, led the criticism of the plan to import more cars from Japan rather than use traditional British vehicles, saying it sent out a bad signal to domestic manufacturers.”

Sad, very sad.

You can read the full article at the Financial Times site.

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Ford is on the verge of selling Jaguar to Indian company Tata after failing to see a return on its investment after nearly 20 years. What caused the British luxury car maker’s decline?

When the Ford Motor Company acquired Jaguar in 1989, the American giant was aiming for a slice of the lucrative European luxury-car business – with ambitions to snatch sales from the dominant Germans.

Nearly 20 years later, however, Jaguar has yet to post a profit, its sales continue to shrink, and the British brand is about to be offloaded to giant Indian company Tata.
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