The fate of legendary car brands

    It used to be so simple: Cars painted racing green were British, red cars were Italian. Now Tata owns Jag, and Volvo is being shopped to the Chinese. We followed the winding road of these heritage brands.

    By Kevin Conley

    Jaguar

    Jaguar opened its doors in 1922 as Swallow Sidecars, making -- yes -- motorcycles sidecars. In 1945, recognizing the dangers of marketing an "SS" car in postwar Britain, the company changed its name, and soon experienced what many see as its finest hour with the introduction of the Jag XK120 in 1948.

    The company's open two-seat roadsters won five of seven runnings at Le Mans in the mid-fifties, and sold well at home and abroad -- especially among celebrities like Clark Gable, Bogie and Bacall, and perhaps most famously, Steve McQueen.

    In 1960, Jaguar began gobbling up smaller companies, until it became British Leyland, Britain's largest car manufacturer. But the growth came largely at the expense of the Jaguar brand: It was acquired in 1989 by Ford, which resold it in 2008 -- having never once shown a profit -- to the Tata group, the Indian conglomerate that also produces the $2,500 Tata Nano, the world's cheapest car.

    Aston Martin

    In 1914, London car salesmen Robert Bamford and Lionel Martin started modifying cars for races in places like Aston Hill. When Bamford left, the name Aston Martin stuck.

    In 1947, tractor baron David Brown bought Aston Martin for a little over $80,000. His DB5 as driven by James Bond had spiked tires, glovebox rifle, and champagne holders. The model made its franchise debut in 1964's Goldfinger ; it has also shared the screen with Pierce Brosnan's Bond and, updated to the DBSV12, with Daniel Craig's 007.

    The drafty chateau of automakers, Aston Martin has been passed from titled owners to wealthy arrivistes for nearly a century, and no one has made money, for a nearly unblemished record of loss (except for a few years in the mid-60s and at the end of Ford's stewardship, from 2005 to 2007).

    In Ford's recent fire sale of its Premier Auto Group, Aston Martin went to an Anglo-Arab consortium made up of a former rally racer, a collector, and two shari'a-compliant Kuwaiti companies, Adeem and Dar Investment.

    Rolls-Royce

    In 1904, engineer Henry Royce and salesman Charles Rolls began selling chassis and engines setups for custom coaches. The car ran remarkably quietly, earning it the nickname the Silver Ghost as early as 1907. (The original 1907 Silver Ghost was recently insured for $35 million, a figure that makes it almost certainly the world's most valuable car.)

    More than any other make, the Rolls was designed not for the pleasure of the driver -- who was usually in the owner's employ -- but for the comfort of the passenger. Backseat luxury was best exemplified by '50s-era models such as the Silver Cloud.

    Thanks to its airplane business, Rolls-Royce avoided going under in the Great Depression when it absorbed Bentley Motors. The company was nationalized in 1971, and the Motors division was resold in 1980. VW thought that it had bought both brands in 1998. But while it controls Bentley and some Rolls trademarks, the actual Rolls name was quietly sold separately. VW now makes Bentleys, like the Continental Flying Spur, with trademark Rolls features like the wire mesh grill; BMW makes Rolls that look like unassuming limos used by British foreign intelligence.

    Opel

    Opel -- which began selling sewing machines in 1863 near Wiesbaden, Germany -- didn't start making cars until 1899. Fifteen years later, the company became the highest selling automobile manufacturer in Germany.

    Over the course of two World Wars, Opel saw its production facilities devastated, sold to GM, nationalized by Nazis, devastated again, resold to GM, then rebuilt slowly, until -- by 1972 -- it reclaimed its position as Germany's leading car manufacturer. The secret to Opel's longevity seems to lie in reliability and affordability rather than comfort or design.

    Opel has many makes -- Astra, Vectra, Manta, Corsa, Cyprus, Tigra, and so on -- but only the Opel GT has come close to stardom: It played the car belonging to bumbling spy Maxwell Smart in Get Smart -- a role it only got in the series' fifth and final season in 1970. The company has become a point of contention lately; just days before GM filed for bankruptcy, a deal was all but completed to sell the company to a consortium led by 76-year-old Frank Stronach, a native Austrian who made his money supplying auto parts to U.S. carmakers. Currently, GM is seeking to retain the company, which may not be able to survive without help from a German government that has expressed strong displeasure at GM's recent flip-flop.

    Volvo

    Volvo was funded in part by a Swedish ball-bearing company (the name is Latin for "I roll") before becoming independent in 1935.

    The company favored automobiles of sturdy construction that could withstand the Scandinavian winters, and it pioneered numerous safety features, like side airbags, rear-window brake lights, and the three-point harness -- creating a reputation that led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1976 to buy a fleet of Volvos that it used to set national safety standards in the U.S.

    Volvo engineers generally overlooked matters of style in their quest for safety -- except in the case of the P1800, a snazzy design that was adopted as the car of choice on the TV series The Saint, which featured Roger Moore playing the polyglot thief Simon Templar.

    In 1999, the company was bought by Ford, where it evolved into more of a luxury brand, competing with the likes of Audi and BMW. Recently, at least two Chinese manufacturers -- state-run Beijing Auto Group and privately held Geely Automobile Holdings -- have expressed interest in buying Volvo from Ford. The current price is rumored to be $3 billion, $3.5 billion less than Ford paid for the company.

    Alfa Romeo

    Ever wonder what ALFA stands for? Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili, which was founded in Milan in 1910. By the '20s, its racing teams, led by Enzo Ferrari, caught the public imagination.

    Collectors favor the sporty two-seater touring cars of the '50s and '60s, like the Giulietta Sprint Speciale, but few cars rival the '30s Alfa Romeo 8C Mille Miglias for pure phallic design -- bespoke vehicles that came to be seen as symbols of the Mussolini era.

    The company was nationalized twice, in 1933 and 1980. In 1986, Fiat took it over, merging its business first with Lancia and later with Maserati to create a lineup of leading Italian luxury automakers.

    Alfa has always seemed comfortable in its sporty niche, but now the ambitious Sergio Marchionne runs Fiat, the parent company once chaired by the charismatic Gianni Agnelli; the Canadian-raised Marchionne's acquisition of Chrysler this summer means the groovy Alfa Spider may potentially share showroom space with the Town & Country minivan.

    Lada

    The Soviet Union was never a key figure in automotive history: The country's most famous brand, Lada, didn't start producing cars until 1966 -- its first effort was a collaboration with Fiat, and the company town, in gratitude, renamed itself Togliatti after the longtime chairman of the Italian Communist Party.

    The car was intended to be the Russian answer to the VW people's car, and its Soviet virtues -- rugged Siberia-proof setup, mechanic-friendly power train -- made it a big seller nearly everywhere in the world except the U.S., where there were political incentives not to buy the Kremlin's most valuable export.

    The car was woefully underpowered: In The Bourne Supremacy, portions of the Moscow chase scene that featured Lada police cars had to be shot against a background of parked cars to give the appearance of speed. The brand is still state-owned, under the Russian Technologies banner, but has partnered with Renault, which makes it now part of the world's third-largest multinational auto company, the Renault-Nissan-Lada group.

    Citroën

    Andre Citroën turned a French gear company he founded in 1913 into a weapons supplier and then, in 1919, into an innovative automobile company. Citroen pioneered front-wheel drive, or "traction avant," in 1934; created half-track off-road vehicles (lovely coaches with tank treads that could -- and did -- cross the Himalayas); and fashioned the world's largest ad, lighting up the Eiffel Tower with 125,000 light bulbs that spelled out the company name.

    The company was taken over by Michelin in 1934 -- reputedly due in no small part to the owner's large baccarat debts -- then sold to Peugeot in 1976. Though Citroens are still sold nearly everywhere on Earth, the cars remain unavailable in the U.S.; the company couldn't alter its bumper construction to meet U.S. safety standards in 1974, and it hasn't bothered to return since.

    Despite this refusal, the DS -- Citroen's most famous model with its elegant design and unique "hydropneumatic self-levelling suspension" -- has remained a favorite of collectors, who have made it one of the most valuable vintage automobiles. Although the company barely changed the design of the DS during its entire production run, from 1955 to 1975, Citroen has recently shown a renewed interest in experiments, introducing a concept car, the Citroen Gran Turismo, developed in conjunction with a Japanese video game company.