MG Rover's chief executive Kevin Howe has admitted that its small 1.4-litre Indian-built CityRover has been a failure. Launched here early this year, only 53 have been sold - registrations in Britain and Ireland are just over 5,000 in eight months.
Speaking at the Paris motor show, Howe said: "The car isn't a success now. We need to put fresh breath into it, maybe looking at price and market position. It simply hasn't hit the targets dealer by dealer."
But he insisted that CityRover, built by Tata of India, would be launched in left-hand-drive on European markets after it has been given "fresh breath".
Despite repeated stories questioning the future of the Rover brand, Howe outlined a confident future for the loss-making British maker through its planned collaboration with the Chinese State-owned Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC). An agreement, he said, was in the "sensitive" final stages of approval by the Chinese government.
Once cleared by Beijing, the expectation is that SAIC will begin financing an ambitious new model programme including a medium-sized replacement for its Rover 45/MG ZS models.
Despite facelifts, MG Rover sales have continued to fall sharply, dropping to 144,000 last year from about 200,000 when BMW pulled out four years ago. The chief executive said this was explained by the company's withdrawal from fleet business which was "not very profitable".
The MG Rover news conference was one of many pre-show events in Paris last week, where the talk was as much about car makers' problems as about products. The international press who flocked to see the new Ford Focus were assailed by angry Jaguar workers from Coventry, distributing leaflets.
Later a major topic at a GM conference was its loss-making Saab division where sales are far below the 200,000 needed for profitability. There is speculation that Saab's Trolhattan plant near Gothenberg could be a casualty of GM cost-cutting, meaning the famous Swedish marque would be built outside Sweden.
"Saab has been doing things its own way for too long," said Carl-Peter Forster, president of GM Europe. "They were preserving their Swedish independence. For our part in GM we should have been more hands on. It's now action time."