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.