Collision course
THE REVOLVO merger, like most merg- ers, looks more like a takeover to me. Renault has the advantage of being backed by the French state, Volvo has been losing its Swedish shareholders' money, so guess which is in the driving seat. Mercedes is laying off staff, Volkswagen is wriggling with embarrassment. How many mass-pro- ducers of cars can the market support? It is an old chestnut, for Britain used to have four — British Leyland, Ford of Britain, Vauxhall and Rootes — and could not sup- port them, even before we formed the habit of importing. Now we have added Nissan and Toyota, and Rover (late BL) is a local dialect form of Honda. The home market cannot possibly support them, but for the Japanese it represents a base inside Europe. They plan to make Britain a net exporter of cars for the first time in a gen- eration. It is the European market, though, that now looks overcrowded with produc- ers, as Revolvo shows us. Somewhere on the Continent, a famous name is booked to be the Rootes of the 1990s.
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