TA, TA, MANGY KITTEN AND DOG.

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It's official.

Ford Motor Company (R) has finally unloaded Jaguar and Land Rover on India's Tata Motors, Ltd. for $2.3 Billion.

Reportedly FoMoCo netted only about a third of what it blew in acquiring them.

(Of course, considering that the entirety of Ford itself is apparently only worth less than a third of what it once was, the "bargain" price is not altogether surprising)

But that's insignificant compared to the huge sums of intellectual and monetary capital that FoMoCo wasted on its "English Patients."

FoMoCo's "big cat and dog" adventure resulted in the abandonment and collapse of Ford's proud Formula One tradition.

It caused the alleged product planners in the Glass House and elsewhere to deprive Lincoln-Mercury of the resources to compete with Cadillac.

It resulted in millions spent attempting to remake a Ford Contour/Mondeo into an abortion of a "Jaguar."

It yielded odd mechanical alliances as Ford sold vehicles powered by derivatives of the antique Buick/Rover/MCT pushrod V8 and a BMW V8.

It failed to yield much in the way of volume or platform synergies or new technologies.

The largest failure of FoMoCo's foray into upscale British motoring is that it abjectly bombed in insulating Ford against poaching from the German and Japanese luxury marques and from market downturns. FoMoCo never achieved the necessary sales quantities of high-profit "quality" models to hedge them from downturns in the broader "quantity" market.

Certainly, FoMoCo should be commended for saving Jaguar from almost certain extinction. When Ford took over, Jaguar quality was legendarily awful and its product line almost entirely obsolete. Ford shepherded the development of the Jaguar AJ-V8, which for a time was considered one of Ward's 10 Best Engines. While Ford never achieved parity for Jaguar with BMW, Audi, Mercedes or even Lexus, it did manage to update Jaguar's model lines and reconnect them somewhat with the brand's historic D.N.A.

However, after Ford's disastrous Jaguar Formula One program, Ford mostly neglected the motorsports involvement that is essential to Jaguar's luxury sporting brand image. And Ford was never able to turn Jaguar into the next destination for FoMoCo customers who had graduated to pure luxury.

Ford's stewardship of Land Rover (the "Dog") was even more uncertain.

BMW had done a lot of the renewal work necessary to rehabilitate the brand from the neglect of the failed British Leyland years. Yet BMW's willingness to hand Land Rover over to Ford ought to have been a warning sign.

Range Rover's uber-luxury niche seemed to decline with the bloat of the luxury-badged SUVs and CUVs (including from competing products of other FoMoCo divisions) as well as Ford's mixed attempts to broaden the Land Rover line. Land Rover advertising always seemed to keep its distance from any identification with Ford. And Land Rover, for all of its storied history, always seemed to run behind legendary brands like Jeep and even upstarts such as Hummer.

Moreover, Land Rover seems ill-positioned to fend off growing Japanese power and increased pressures on fuel economy.

Both Jaguar and Land Rover undoubtedly held down FoMoCo's "import" Corporate Average Fuel Economy numbers in the U.S.A. and would have been an increased drag as the draconian 35 M.P.G. CAFE standard is crammed down on all participants in the U.S. market.

Unlike Ford's unnecessary fire sale of Aston Martin, it was past time for FoMoCo to spin off the Mangy Cat and its aging off-road Dog. It's just too bad that FoMoCo had to spend so many precious development dollars to learn of and extricate themselves from the mistake.