QUOTE (bill van snorkle @ Aug 15 2006, 12:43 PM)

Some years ago, before Ford, before BMW, when British Aerospace briefly owned LandRover and wanted to offload it, JCB expressed a casual interest in aquiring it . With RangeRover and Discovery moving further and further upmarket, and Defender losing its way altogether I personally would like to see JCB, a staunchly British company that knows a thing or two about building working four wheel drive vehicles that work, buying the rights to Defender only, redesigning it into a very strong,reliable and highly capable vehicle that hopefully would win back many of the industrial, rural and military markets that LandRover surrendered to the German and Japanese throughout the world.
Bill.
Interesting.
Just talking to a stanchly loyal JCB guy just the other day. I know nowt about the quality of such vehicles but his demolition company have been using JCBs for a couple of generations. He was bemoaning the crappy build quality and general half-arsed engineering in JCB products these days. His theory was JCB come up with the neat ideas and people like CAT and Kubota take the concept and build it properly. He also reckoned it was only be a matter of time before JCB sells out to a major player.
I should say, despite their faults he continues to buy JCB. Sound familiar...?
Kev