Rover: Design and Engineering - by Jon Pressnell (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first in-depth account of the car manufacturing company Rover's postwar design and engineering journey, from independent auto maker to technological pioneer.

Lost in the collapse of the automotive conglomerate British Leyland, it is easy to forget that Rover was once a proudly independent maker of high-quality vehicles. The company managed to be both orthodox and innovative, respecting traditions but prepared to push boundaries, not least in its pioneering and successful work with gas-turbine cars. Some of its models remain design landmarks; others showed huge promise but never made it to production, snuffed out by British Leyland's dog-eat-dog internal politics. The thread running through all these cars is a sparkling creativity: a willingness, born out of painstaking research and experimentation, to do things differently if that meant doing them better.

Based on a treasure trove of detailed interviews from the late 1990s and backed up by recent interviews, this is the first book to tell the true inside story of post-war Rover design and engineering. Full of fascinating firsthand testimony, it shows how a relatively small and essentially family-run concern could lift itself up to be a technological leader.

About the Author

Jon Pressnell is a journalist and automotive historian. Best known for his contributions to the magazine Classic & Sports Car, for which he has written since the 1980s, he has a reputation as a rigorous and original researcher, especially on the British motor industry. Amongst his books are histories of the Mini, the Citroën Traction Avant and DS, and the Austin-Healey. His groundbreaking Morris--The Cars and the Company won the 2014 Michael Sedgwick Award presented by the Society of Automotive Historians in Britain. He has authored two other books for Dalton Watson. Marcel Pourtout Carrossier received a 2022 Motoring Book of the Year award, and Kim, A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber received a 2023 Motoring Book of the Year award and the SAH Cugnot Award.