Rover: Design and Engineering: The Inside Story 1945-1976

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.