Before BAE blew the wheels off the Honda-Rover partnership, you could buy the same basic car from either, as either the Rover 200 or the Honda Civic. The 200 had a the unreliable Rover K Series engine and crap build quality, whereas the Civic had a Honda engine and was built by Honda on their own line. As if that wasn't enough, the Rover actually cost more. Why have cotton when you could have silk.
I was mightily relieved when Rover finally went out of business. It was both a national tragedy (not least for the workforce) and a downright embarrassment – and the people who ran it towards the end (Towers et al) seemed to behave like criminals, selling the assets for their personal gain at the expense of the pensioners.
The Roewe brand lives on in China and we have now started to see some of the new MG vehicles on the roads here. Wouldn't be surprised to find they are better engineered and more reliable than the old Rovers, despite being substantially Chinese.
Murray