Sick of waiting

DO you know what, I’m not holding my breath any more for this SAIC deal. I have been doing up to now, but its getting a bit beyond credible this story. I know the Chinese authorities are cagey and don’t rush things but all of MGR’s self-imposed deadlines have passed, and all we’ve heard is that the initial monster £1bn investment that SAIC would make was incorrect by a factor of 5, then that even ‘if’ (not when) the deal was done thousands of jobs would go at Longbridge, then that Gordon Brown was going to china to try to gee things up a bit, now this. You have to be VERY blinkered or have a drug-induced level of optimism to still be smiling about MGR’s future.

In the meantime MGR are selling a pitiful numbers of old cars (which I agree are still amazingly capable given their age and tech) and we all sit with baited breath.

Lets be honest the Phoenix 4 have disappointed up to now. Their record of clinching critical deals is not good. Co-operation with china Brilliance? Failed. Proton? Failed (probably a good thing that one). Buy the old Daewoo factory? Failed. New car? Failed. Don’t tell me the RDX 60 ‘is nearly here’, its YEARS late even by MGR’s own deadlines. John Towers claimed that MGR could and would ‘do’ the next medium sized car on their own if necessary but 2 years on from his statement, they have not. This car needs to be bloody good if it does arrive, and as time goes on and MGR’s existing cars look more and more outdated, (even the 75 is getting old now, and the re-style did it no favours) all that seems harder and harder to achieve. The wobbly tall hatch thing leaked into ‘The Sun’ does not fill me with optimism.

What the Phoenix 4 have achieved, is to tidy up the financial structure of all its sub-divisions (good), flog off the land that Longbridge is sitting on (bad – where has that money gone exactly? Would MGR be dead by now if they hadn’t done that?), and bring us the cool but absurd X-power road-melter coupé and the Rat-a-tat-tat Tata Indica (bad), for which you can see we are eternally grateful, from its pitiful sales figures and lousy mag reviews.

I know they invested big chunks of their own money when they bought out MGR, and I’m sre they al still have that personal urge to make it succeed, but the fact is if the factory got nuked tomorrow they would be laughing all the way to the bank (provided they weren’t in it at the time).

So, I certainly hope to be proved wrong, but for me the future is very grim-looking