ROVER is in danger of sacrificing its future in fleet after parent company BMW revealed that the 200 and 400 will be replaced by a single lower medium sector model. This would leave Rover without a new upper medium car and therefore without a four-car model range considered crucial to corporate success.

BMW's chairman Joachim Milberg announced the Rover 200 and 400 will be replaced by a single medium-sized car, to compete against the Ford Focus and Vauxhall Astra, which will be built at Longbridge. 'The new medium car will have a similar wide variety of derivatives as the BMW 3-series, to develop a whole family of cars from which we expect significant growth in volume,' he said.

The 200/400 replacement is set to go on sale in three years' time, but there is no sign yet of a Rover competitor to cars like the Ford Mondeo. A Rover spokesman suggested there may be a degree of platform engineering with the new car likely to offer hatchback, saloon and estate variants, in the same way that the VW Group has built the Golf, Skoda Octavia, SEAT Toledo and Audi A3 on one platform.