The Rover Company is a former British car manufacturing company originally founded as Starley & Sutton Co. of Coventry in 1878. After developing the template for the modern bicycle with its Rover Safety Bicycle of 1885, the company moved into the automotive industry. It started building motorcycles and Rover cars, using their established marque with the iconic Viking Longship, from 1904 onwards. Land Rover vehicles were added from 1947 onwards, with all production based in Solihull, UK.

The Rover marque became the primary brand of the newly named Rover Group in 1968 as it passed first through the hands of British Aerospace and then into the ownership of BMW Group. Technological know-how gained from Honda and financial investment during the BMW ownership led to a revival of the Rover marque during the 1990s.

In 2000, BMW sold the Rover and related MG car activities of the Rover Group to the Phoenix Consortium, who established the MG Rover Group at Longbridge. BMW retained ownership of the Rover marque, allowing MG Rover to use it under licence. In April 2005, Rover branded cars ceased to be produced when the MG Rover Group became insolvent. BMW sold the Rover marque to Ford in 2006 for approximately £6 million.

In March 2008, Ford reached agreement with Tata Motors of India to include the Rover marque as part of the sale of their Jaguar Land Rover operations to them, alongside related Daimler and Lanchester marques.

The Rover V8 engine is a compact V8 internal combustion engine with aluminium cylinder heads and cylinder block, originally designed by General Motors and later re-designed and produced by Rover in the United Kingdom. It has been used in a wide range of vehicles from Rover and other manufacturers over several decades. The Rover V8 began life as the Buick 215, an all-aluminium engine introduced for the 1961 model year. The compact engine was lightweight, at just 144 kg, and capable of high power outputs: the most powerful Buick version of this engine rated 200 hp (149 kW).

In January 1964 Rover gave American operations head J. Bruce McWilliams permission to investigate the possible purchase of an American V8 engine for Rover cars. McWilliams began an aggressive campaign to convince GM to sell the tooling, which they finally agreed to do in January 1965. As well as appearing in Rover cars, the engine was widely sold by Rover to small car builders, and has appeared in a wide variety of vehicles. Rover V8s feature in some models from Morgan, TVR, Triumph, Land Rover and MG. The Rover V8 has long been virtually the standard engine for hot rod use in Britain, much as the Chevrolet small-block V8 is for American builders.

The demise of the MG Rover Group in 2005 led to a halt in production of the famed Rover V8 after 40 years.

-Some content sourced from Wikipedia