COLLAPSED car giant MG Rover formally appointed administrators yesterday following the breakdown of take-over talks.

A team from PriceWaterhouse Coopers will go through the books and try to salvage something from the wreckage of Britain's last volume car manufacturer on Monday.

Parent company Phoenix Venture Holdings issued a brief statement that read: ''The board of directors has met with PriceWaterhouseCoopers this morning. The directors are taking the necessary steps to appoint administrators from PWC for MG Rover Group and Powertrain.

''All employees are asked to come to work normally on Monday.''

In the short-term, administrators will try to find buyers for all or part of the group. Had the group called in receivers - as Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt suggested on Thursday evening - it would have been broken up and sold immediately to repay creditors.

But the future looks grim for the famous name that still employs 6,100 staff at its Longbridge plant, in Birmingham.

Parts shortages have led to production delays for weeks. Workers leaving the plant said there hadn't been enough fascias and wheels to go around.

Rover was forced to call a halt when 78 parts suppliers refused to grant the group credit.

So what options remain?

The Government comes to the rescue...

The Wilson Government saved British Leyland from bankruptcy in 1975, but things were very different then.

A Government-commissioned report by Sir Don Ryder concluded that BL needed £1.2bn plus £260m of working capital if it was to survive. Those were enormous figures in 1975, but the alternative was even worse. If BL was allowed to go to the wall, more than a million people would have lost their jobs. The Government paid up.

Since then, the workforce has dwindled to only 6,100 and another 20,000 have jobs that are partly dependent on continued production at Longbridge.

Tony Blair said the Government was prepared to help the company, but a 1975-style Government bail-out is unthinkable.

The Chinese return to the negotiating table...

Shangai Automotive Industries Corporation (SAIC) maintains it wants to do the deal, but cannot be held responsible for MG Rover's debts.

The offer of a £100m government loan was supposed to help oil the cogs for a deal with SAIC.

Unfortunately, EU regulations mean it must be repaid within six months. Otherwise, the UK would stand accused of giving state aid to an ailing company. SAIC wanted MG Rover to repay the money over two years.

If the British group goes under, the Chinese will still walk away with the rights to the K-Series engine. They will also have the benefit of 12 months spent discovering how to engineer new cars. Arguably, they may have already obtained the production expertise they need.

Only the Rover brand - already so badly damaged - escaped their clutches.

The Chinese have pumped nearly £70m into Rover already - cash swallowed up as the group battled to stay afloat - it will not put any more in until it is sure the company is solvent.

MG is split from Rover and sold as a going concern...

Ironically, this is the plan put forward by investment bank Alchemy in 1999.

Then, the deal with BMW foundered because Alchemy could only guarantee 2,000 jobs and the Phoenix Consortium pledged to save nearly three times as many.

The MG name retains a large degree of the customer goodwill that has slowly drained away from the Rover brand.

The whole lot goes to the wall...

MG Rover looks to be down and out, only months before Longbridge is due to celebrate its centenary.

Back in November 1905, Herbert Austin had a grand vision for his car factory. He believed the British motor industry could become the most successful in the world. Austin was nearly right. In the 1930s and 1940s, British car makers were second only to the US.

Lord Austin's office is preserved at Longbridge. The wood-panelled room with its imposing fireplace harks back to another era, but one story about Herbert Austin illustrates the stark choices that have always confronted custodians of Longbridge.

Once before when the plant faced closure, Austin took a coin from his pocket and tossed it. Heads to stay, tails to close. It came up heads, so Austin went before the workforce and pledged to keep going - provided they were prepared to work for one month without pay.

If they did, he promised "a job for life" as long as Longbridge was there. And some of those workers took Austin at his word. Well into the 1970s, some of them were still in post, way past retirement age, pursuing their "Job for Life". The time is long since gone when MG Rover could repeat such a promise.