Tata Indica/City Rover In Top 10 Worst Cars List

Tata Motors purchased and turned the fortunes of Jaguar and Land Rover, but the company's association with another UK automaker, prior to this, did not result in a positive outcome. MG Rover Group, a now defunct UK based automaker, started selling the Tata Indica, under licence, as the CityRover in 2003 with disastrous results.

CityRover was a rebadged Tata Indica that was marketed as a Supermini with a relatively low price tag of GBP 7,000 (~INR 7 lakh). The car turned out to be a major flop though and production was stopped in April 2005.

UK based automobile publication AutoExpress has now included the CityRover in its Top 10 Worst Cars in the past 25 years list. In it's description the publication states: "Despite a bargain sub-£7,000 price at launch, the CityRover was poorly received from the off, with its lamentable build quality coming in for particular criticism."

Indians are all too familiar with the words ‘poor build quality' and even in India the Indica and cars from Tata Motors in general are not particularly known for their build quality. Nevertheless, Indian buyers, especially first time buyers are less demanding than European buyers.

Naturally, the poorly built CityRover did not go down well with buyers in UK, who wanted more value for their money. To make things worse for the MG Rover Group for each CityRover sold it had to pay a commission of GBP 3,000 to Tata Motors. The poor performance of the CityRover, a last ditch effort by GM Rover, proved too great to bear and took the company under in 2005.