Goodbye Rover

BMW’s plan to sell its Land Rover line of four-wheel-drive vehicles means the final dismemberment of Britain’s largest carmaking business and the demise of one of motoring’s most venerable names. The announcement that Ford Motor Co. has agreed to buy Land Rover for about $2.9 billion came Friday. The Rover Co. Ltd. began operating in 1906 and was mass producing cars by the 1920s. From its origins as a Victorian-era partnership of bicycle makers in Coventry, England, Rover evolved into a high-volume carmaker whose mounting losses have earned it the moniker “The English Patient” among BMW partisans in Germany. By selling off the Rover Group piecemeal, BMW will effectively wipe out a brand whose colorful but tortured history mirrors the long decline of heavy industry in the United Kingdom.