The Indica was styled by IDEA in Italy by the way……..

These were quite a popular choice for Indian taxi drivers. There's still quite a lot of them on the roads for how old they are now.

Ah, I know the car you mentioned at the end of the video - the Perodua Kelisa, which Clarkson destroyed on his 2005 film, "Heaven and Hell" (one of my favourite of his home movies). it's a rebadged Daihatsu Cuore, built in Malaysia; arguably not a bad car at all for its purpose.

I used to do sub contract valeting for an MG Rover dealer. They brought me one to prep for display. My pressure washer, unchanged from the last 500 cars it successfully cleaned, managed to remove one side skirt, most of the rear badges and blew a door seal off. Quality engineering. For what they were asking for them it was a piss take. And yes the paint was little more than a blow over. The paint depth was the lowest I'd seen of any new product, a good go over with the polishing machine would bring it to bare metal.

The National Trust and English Heritage badges perfectly identifiy the key demographic this car was specifically aimed at. Who have all now expired.

Indica and indigo (sedan version) ruled indian taxi segment over a decade most of them easily crossed over 200000 kms

This car in India sold really well in taxi market
So much so tata tried to launch a taxi version called Indicab stripped of any bling or nice things.
But most taxi drivers got the regular version because they used them for their personal use on weekends for family.
The sheer numbers and the upgrade tata gave to indica with body styles from sedan , station wagon and even a limo version
Tata learned from this and are now the automotive behemoth they are

Brilliant content as always. I worked at a Rover dealer in Scotland from the 90’s though to the early 00’s in the parts dept and can confirm that this is completely accurate description of exactly how it was. The small community I lived in were very loyal to the brand and on our end salespeople, servicing, mechanics etc really took pride in the cars sold and after sales for each and every customer.  It was something they were really proud of. When this came along it could have been half the price and still it wouldn’t have sold.

The sad thing about these city rovers were that they could of been sold dirt cheap

The problem was the consortium running rover at the time were completely corrupt and bought them for £1500, they then sold them (to themselves) for £3000.....

Hence why the high sales price

5:15 that's a Panda 100hp, not an Eleganza. It was my brother's first car and he absolutely loved it.

In 2008 I was working at Subaru. The Impreza WRX cost them about £12,500 to import but the list price was over £20,000. It costs a lot of money to market and sell cars, especially taking into account dealer margin and sales incentives.

Rover's biggest problem was that they seemed to think their badge had the credentials to sell cars at a higher price. It's like they were stuck in the 1960s and forgot that they ended three decades earlier. I remember their range from the late 90s and it was a collection of mostly garbage.

There was the 100, a rebadged Metro, which had already failed crash tests before they facelifted it and gave it a Rover badge. It fooled nobody, we all knew it was an Austin that, in the early 80s was halfway decent, but in the late 90s it was already well past its sell-by date, yet for some reason they thought they could sell it for more.

The 200 was, to be fair, Rover's own design and wasn't that bad. The problem was, it didn't sell very well because it was supposed to be in the same class as the Fiesta, but was priced closer to the Focus. If they'd undercut the Fiesta just a tiny bit, they'd have had no problem shifting it as, at the time, it was a better and more spacious car.

The 400 was, if I recall correctly, a modified Honda, in much the same vein as the Triumph Acclaim. But if I also remember correctly, it was an old model that Honda deemed to not be good enough any more. I drove a 400 and it wasn't very good. And it was hideously overpriced compared to the Focus it was going up against.

The 800 was another Honda, but this one was one Honda was still selling themselves. It was a decent car, but you know there's something amiss when the car it's based on was being sold at a lower price. Dynamically, the 800 was streets ahead, but trying to justify that in the price was a hard sell.

By the time the CityRover appeared on the market, the 100 had been dropped for failing the crash tests (again!), the 200 became the 25 and the 400 became the 45, with both models inexplicably increasing in price. This, I guess, was to try and support the R&D on the new 75, which was a really decent effort, but they priced it so high as to make it untenable to anyone who wasn't a die-hard Rover fan. Had they pitched the pricing properly, Ford would've had to drop the awful Scorpio before it even hit the showrooms.

0:29 liking the James May intro straight away

The other thing to remember for 2004 - the Ford Fiesta mk5 started at just over £8,000.  A car that everyone considered as having possibly the best small hatchback chassis of the time.

The current Tata Tiago which is being sold in international markets, is actually upgrade of this same car, both are built on Tata's X1 Platform, you can even see the side resemblance at 5:50, Tiago has similar but refined shape but only with new engines, Tata Revotron & Tata Revotorq.

Fun fact, the TATA Indica was India's first indigenous car. Before this, all the indian cars made were either british cars from the 50s or cars that were based on trucks or jeeps. Plus it was styled by Italian Design House Institute (I. DE. A) who also styled the Ferrari Mondial. Quite the irony 😂

A pal of mine was working at Rover at this time.
They weren't just broke- they were already bankrupt.
So much so, that when they allowed their engineers to take a City Rover for a drive to appraise it, the engineers had to PAY for the petrol.

7:13 Sorry but you missed an important point. It was designed by IDEA designing studio, and due to design similarities with the Fiat Punto, the company was bankrupted by lawsuits from Fiat. So Tata absorbed almost the entirety of the workforce at IDEA so that the car can still be bought  to the market.

475 MPFI: 4 = 4 cyl, 75 = 75mm stroke (that took a little googling), MPFI = multi-point fuel injection. MPFI might have been a strong selling point in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Not so much by the early 2000s, I suspect.

Said i needed a video on this yesterday, Luke delivered