Motoring: Gavin Green

Whoever ends up buying Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, I hope it isn't a British bidder. Large British companies, including Vickers (current custodian) and British Aerospace (former Rover keeper) have consistently proved themselves incapable of managing British car makers. Their "drip feed investment/ where are the profits?" short-term mentality is inimical to the interests of a hugely investment-intensive car company. Is it any wonder that the Germans and the Japanese, who can always see beyond the next quarterly forecast, are the world's most successful motor industry protagonists, along with those entrepreneurial giants in America?

A consortium of wealthy British enthusiasts would be even more disastrous. At least two such groups are in the running to buy Rolls, with big-name backers allegedly including Mohamed al Fayed and the Formula One impresario Bernie Ecclestone. A consortium led by the barrister Michael Shrimpton reckons that it can raise the money from wealthy owners, while another, led by Kevin Morley, former marketing director of Rover, says it can raise venture capital, which, of course, would be even worse.

Rolls-Royce's current boss, Graham Morris, also hopes that a foreign company buys Rolls, "There is no suitable UK bidder. I could have raised the money to buy Rolls-Royce Motor Cars as part of a management buy-out, and, as with most management buy-outs, we probably could have made a lot of money for ourselves. But this company desperately needs a big company to buy it, and invest in it, and help it."

Morris says that must be another car company, and he hopes to be part of the plan, by staying on as Rolls-Royce's chief executive officer.

The nightmare scenario is that one of these quaint British consortia, full of high nationalistic passion but with precious little practical experience, bankrolled by some Anglophile billionaire, will offer the highest price to Vickers. Vickers, being a plc, is duty bound to accept the best offer for its shareholders - in most cases, the highest bid. Rolls is then owned by a another bunch of short-term idealists/ profiteers who soon prove themselves eminently unsuitable, and the "For Sale" palaver soon starts all over again. Sooner or later Rolls is going to be owned by a major foreign car company - almost certainly German, and almost certainly BMW - so you might as well get it over with now.

Fortunately, the omens, should BMW buy Rolls, are good. Blue-chip British car brands have recently prospered under foreign ownership. Jaguar was getting nowhere as a Tory-privatised plc, no matter how masterful the former chairman, John Egan, was at suggesting otherwise. Once sold to Ford (making millionaires out of many of its short-term investors) it prospered massively. The cars are now better than ever, and, come 2001, production will have more than quadrupled compared with the Egan days.

BMW's purchase of Rover has proved more difficult, not least because Rover was even more of a basket case than Jaguar when the Germans marched in. But things are getting better. The first BMW-influenced model, the Land Rover Freelander, is the first internationally competitive Rover Group car for more than 20 years. And the next, the Rover 600/ 800-replacing R40, to be shown at next year's Geneva show, promises to be as well made as a BMW, while being true to traditional Rover brand values (comfort, gentility, spaciousness, styling majesty). This is in contrast to all the sad and substandard Rovers made over the past decade or so, which have mostly been rebodied versions of old-school Hondas or, in the case of the recently departed Rover 100, a rebadged Metro.

After numerous lightweight, or non-car-literate, British Rover managers, who had little or no idea of what Rover should stand for (a weakness subsequently exposed in the type of cars that were launched) and no international experience, BMW boss Bernd Pischetsrieder is of a hugely higher calibre. What should a Rover be? I asked him, a few months after the BMW take-over. "Cheaper Jaguars," he replied. He is spot on, of course.

If the British car industry had had a few Pischetsrieders of its own in positions of power, back in the dim and dark days of the Sixties and Seventies, then our indigenous industry might not have self-destructed so ignominiously. And Rolls-Royce Motor Cars would not be better off being owned by the Germans.