21 Facts About Rootes Group

Rootes Group or Rootes Motors Limited was a British automobile manufacturer and, separately, a major motor distributors and dealers business.

At its height in 1960, Rootes Group had manufacturing plants in the Midlands at Coventry and Birmingham, in southern England at Acton, Luton and Dunstable, and a brand-new plant in the west of Scotland at Linwood.

Rootes Group was under-capitalised and unable to survive industrial relations problems and losses from the 1963 introduction of a new aluminium-engined small car, the Hillman Imp.

Rootes Group was founded in Hawkhurst, Kent, in 1913 by William Rootes Group as a car sales agency independent from his father's Hawkhurst motor business.

Rootes Group had moved his operations to Maidstone by 1914 and there he contracted to repair aero engines.

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Hillman and Commer were made wholly owned subsidiaries of Humber Limited and the Rootes Group brothers' holding eventually became 60 percent of the Humber ordinary shares.

New Rootes Group Limited was incorporated in 1933 to hold the very profitable core business of the Rootes Group brothers: the motor distribution and servicing functions, and its extension and development of export markets.

Rootes Group was now a public listed company and the new capital repaid the Prudential and Midland Bank loans.

Rootes Group owned, on average, about 80 per cent of the capital of its subsidiaries.

In 1940, under the Government's shadow factory scheme, Rootes Group built its massive assembly plant in Ryton-on-Dunsmore, near Coventry, initially manufacturing aircraft, one of the first types being the Bristol Blenheim.

Rootes Group manufactured military vehicles, based on the Humber and Commer.

Rootes Group had a rare lapse of business judgement shortly after WWII.

Rootes Group successfully sold a range of cars priced at a slight premium to their major home market competitors, justified on the basis that they offered a level of superiority in design and finish.

Rootes Group introduced a novel supercharged diesel engine in 1954, based on a Sulzer Brothers concept.

Rootes Group considered that the Alpine's sales would be improved with a more powerful model.

In 1963, Rootes Group introduced the Hillman Imp, a compact rear-engined saloon with an innovative all-aluminium OHC engine, based on a Coventry Climax engine design .

In 1968, Rootes Group entered a factory team in the London-Sydney Marathon.

In June 1964 Rootes Group Motors announced Chrysler Corporation would take a 30 per cent interest in their ordinary capital offering current shareholders double the market price and a 50 per cent share in the non-voting preference capital for almost three times market price.

The Rootes Group name had largely vanished by 1971, and its other brand names were progressively phased out during the 1970s.

In Iacocca—an Autobiography, former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca was disparaging of the Rootes Group operation, writing that Chrysler should never have bought it.

Maidstone, where William Rootes Group set up his business in 1914, managed to keep the Rootes Group name on their building until 2007.