Business editor David Duffy looks at the impact of the new Cowley-built Rover 75 - and BMW's massive investment in the Oxford factory. Driving past Rover's Cowley sprawling car works the factory's fading frontage provides precious few clues to the revolution hidden inside.

The perceivable pointers to progress scattered along Oxford's ring road are the clearances of huge tracts of crumbling buildings and the odd gleaming new sign proclaiming a rebranded Rover Oxford plant.

Concealed from the glance of casual passers-by, the internal changes have been radical, not just in the machinery, but in the mentality of those building one of Britain's most prestigious cars.

The sparkling new equipment has been matched by the re-tuning of the minds of those building the car to produce a product of a quality unheard of in the plant's modern history. All the more galling to the workforce that elements of the national media have proved consistently and inexplicably hostile to both Rover and its new car, the Rover 75 luxury saloon, despite it scooping a series of national and international awards.

Last week Rover chairman Prof Werner SM- mann was presented with the prestigious Golden Steering Wheel Award for the 75 - the first British-built car ever to win the German award.

Today Rover workers were due to discover if the car has scooped the title of European Car of the Year 2000. Shortlisted for the final five, it was the only executive or luxury car remaining in the competition.

Against this background of award-winning success, Rover spokesman Vin Hammersley said he was baffled by the constant sniping which had affected the morale of the workforce.

He said: "We have been through a bad time and this stuff is not designed to help us. Why they have got it in for Rover at Oxford is beyond me."

Seven hundred million pounds is a fearsome investment and a signal that Rover's German parent company BMW means business in Oxford. BMW's huge cash injection was initially pumped in to produce a world-class plant to produce Rover's new flagship, the luxury Rover 75 saloon.

The Countess of Wessex, a specialist in public relations and marketing, has also been brought on board to help boost the car's image worldwide, but the 75 is just the start of a new chapter in Cowley's story.

Its platform - the base on which the car is built - is extremely versatile and it is known that the next model to emerge from the plant will be an estate version.

Reports of a coup model, possibly bearing the Riley badge, also continue and it is also believed a project to produce a people carrier, shelved by Rover some years ago, could be revived at Cowley.

With land to spare and a state-of-the-art paint shop, with a massive capacity, the most recent suggestion is that BMW are considering Cowley as a potential site for a new £500m plant to build Rolls-Royce cars.

The German car maker will only say it is studying several sites in England to build the new factory and expects to make a decision in the next six months. Rover's plant at Cowley has a long association with Rolls- Royce and for 50 years it manufactured body assemblies for the luxury car maker.

That manufacturing work for Rolls- Royce only finished two years ago when millions of pounds were invested in a new body assembly plant at Crewe.

Another strong link between both companies is Rolls-Royce's manufacturing director Doug Dickson, who is the former managing director of Rover's Cowley plant and was in charge of the mental and physical transformation of the Cowley plant in the run-up to the launch of the Rover 75.

The group is planning to launch a new Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph with a BMW engine when it starts production after taking control of the Rolls-Royce marque from rival German car manufacturer Volkswagen in 2003.

VW bought Rolls-Royce from Vickers for £470m last year, but under an agreement with BMW will only retain the Bentley brand in the long-term.

In the short-term Cowley's fortunes rest on the Rover 75, which is expected to spearhead a sales recovery for Rover.

Workers are now working flat-out to produce the car with the re-introduction of Sunday working for the first time in decades and the arrival of workers from other plants at Swindon and Birmingham to help. BMW's faith appears to be starting to pay off. It said sales of Rover cars were starting to recover, despite a 30 per cent fall in deliveries to customers in the first nine months of the year, compared with a 19.4 per cent rise for Land Rover and a ten per cent increase for BMW.

The firm said that Rover sales were showing "clear signs of recovery" in the UK with market share up from 3.4 per cent to 5.8 per cent last month and buoyant sales in overseas markets.

The Munich-based German car giant predicted an up-turn in sales of the new top-of-the range Rover 75, which has sold about 10,000 overall and 4,500 in the UK market.

Story date: Tuesday 16 November

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.