See a parallel? LTI Black Cabs featuring at the Olympics; Jaguar Land Rover's product placement splurge in the new Bond Skyfall film?

Sorry boys and girls, in the real, big bad world, fawning media reviews, PR flummery and London-centric advertising make-believe do not trump real product development, sustained investment, and general, slogging hard work on the fundamentals.

What should be the specific question about Manganese Bronze/London Taxis International is where has all the money gone? What happened to a five year ago near quarter billion pounds valued business? Far from Geely being the villain of the piece, labelled already as another probable johnny foreigner "lifter and shifter" of LTI's assets, the question should be asked was Geely itself duped into buying a fifth of the business back in 2009 at a massively over-inflated price, at around £2.50 a share. Did the directors of Manganese Bronze Holdings sell any share options before the latest, final share price collapse? Why did an in fact cottage industry/jobbing shop outfit like Manganese, turning out fewer than 2,000 units a year, buying in most of its mechanicals, like the complete powertrain from Fiat(VM and Chrysler), so in effect just a low-volume coach builder, ever get such a ridiculously, potentially fraudulent high value, and why do people still believe there is anything in that operation in Coventry of any real, intrinsic worth.

1950s icons don't cut the mustard or make the payroll sixty years down the line. I doubt very much Geely will want what's left of the assets of LTI. The management of Geely should be ashamed they ever got suckered in by the pin stripped, snakeoil salesmen of the Manganese Bronze Holdings board. Geely have far more pressing concerns anyway, like its substantial Volvo acquisition and keeping that afloat, not some 1950s throwback, two-bob outfit in the West Midlands.

In the UK there's far too much PR hype over hard, cold, on the ground reality. Just taking the automotive sector, if one went by the media one would think the recent UK automotive industry story is one of success, without exception, going from one record to another. What the media hacks don't tell the plebeian citizens is the likes of Lola Cars going under in the last few weeks; the story of Cosworth, the engine maker, and its owners initially trying to float the company publicly at a massively unrealistic £250m, but now being forced to try to trade sell it for £100m, and still finding no buyers, or mugs rather. Then there's Lotus Cars, which the media told us until quite recently was bouncing back and so on, but actually has basically stopped producing, is threatened with being sued by its suppliers for non-payment, has around £250m in total debt, and is looking like being wound up before not too long by its Malaysian owners, tired of the constant losses and BS always 'jam tomorrow' from the local management.

And then there's General Motors in the UK, which the media told us a few months ago had scored a great victory over its German sister operation. Now we find the reality that GM Europe's Vauxhall and Opel operations may well be integrated with Peugeot's, if not sold outright by GM to PSA, meaning a vast rationalisation of Vauxhall and Opel's works, making Ellesmere Port and Luton's future highly uncertain.

And then there's the biggie, Jaguar, which the media has sung the praises of constantly over the last few years as a huge success story. On the ground the media ain't fooling anyone. Jaguar last month delivered fewer than 3,000 units worldwide. see: http://www.autonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121015/OEM/310159797/jaguar-land-rover-sales-dip-adds-pressure-on-parent-tata

Compare that to the more than double figure given by JLR themselves for Jaguar's retail sales: http://newsroom.jaguarlandrover.com/en-in/jlr-corp/news/2012/10/jlr_sales_september_151012/?from=1&count=5&marketLanguageNodeId=1275&brandId=2830&ContentType=NewsArticles&locus=1

Looks like Tata, being a publicly quoted company, with all the legal and fiduciary obligations that go with that, has to be a teensy bit more careful about presenting nearer to reality figures than JLR's press office Alice in Wonderland figures.

Jaguar is in serious trouble. The media says its success knows no bounds; the people on the ground - the poor plebs who rely on it to make a wage - know differently. Jaguar's two main models, the XF and XJ, cannot hope to compete with a deluge of new models, myriad variants and technologies from the Germans, BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz. Ford tried to put Jaguar eye to eye with the Germans ten years ago, and it cost it a fortune. Jaguar needed a serious 3-series competitor, to replace the X-type, at least three years ago. Nothing has been done; Jaguar needed an SUV, to compete with the huge-selling Audi Q5 and BMW X3, but nothing was done, probably because JLR had no suitable platform, the Evoque/Freelander being front wheel drive platforms, without huge investment.

The point is, Manganese Bronze was not, and will not be alone. Too many have been caught up in the spin over the 'march of the makers', the supposed runaway success of the UK's automotive sector, the rebound of West Midlands manufacturing, linked to JLR in particular, and so on. There is no substitute for *real* cash investment, a highly trained workforce, and above all, a long-term, guardianship view of proprietorship, which was abundantly lacking at Manganese, with what looks like above all a get rich(er) quick scheme for the chiefs, and the indians sent down the road. Let's stop kidding each other and accept that past mistakes, rooted in human greed, have queered the pitch for many dependent on the making of things for a livelihood and finally accept that management, investment and attitude to ownership above all has to change before we can talk about all the flowery things, like design, innovation and supposed icons, else we and our children will end up in nothing but museums, dedicated to past glorious 'icons'.