Who was that elegant stranger sipping tea and poking around in the service shop of Allen Aron's Chicago area Jaguar dealership this month?

None other than the man who now owns Jaguar, Indian industrialist and billionaire Ratan Tata.

Tata, who just paid $3 billion to acquire Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor Co., wasted no time flying over to the United States to meet some of the brand's oldest and biggest dealers.

It was his first visit to a Jaguar dealership. Anywhere. And also the first time in memory dealers have laid eyes on their top factory decision-maker.

"I've been a Jaguar dealer for 40 years," says Norm Tompkins, owner of San Jose British Motors near San Francisco, whom Tata invited to lunch. "In all the years Ford owned us, I never met a single Ford executive."

Tata's cross-country dealership pilgrimage, flying with his top executives and a male personal secretary aboard the chairman's private jet, made a clear impression on Jaguar and Rover dealers.

With a warm personality and a patient ear, the 70-year-old Tata appears to be winning over quickly the anxious hearts of two orphaned luxury brands.

"I was never hugged as much by my own father as I was hugged by him," Aron admits. Aron, one of the first Jaguar dealers in the United States, invited Tata to his 55-year-old Imperial Motors store in Wilmette, Ill.

"He embraces you and touches you, which is a good thing. To me, that's the sign of a very warmhearted person.

"I'm telling you this," Aron says, growing serious: "He's going to make something out of Jaguar. We're in good hands now. My son can see his future here now."


Steaks and ideas
Barely two weeks after closing the deal with Ford this month, Tata invited Aron and a few other Chicago area Jaguar and Rover dealers to dinner at Chicago's Peninsula Hotel. Tata asked the dealers to tell him their ideas and wishes for their brands.

Over steaks, the chairman and his secretary took notes on the comments. Dealers asked the new owner for a convertible Jaguar sports car. They alerted Tata that Bentley, owned by Volkswagen AG, has become a fierce new competitor for them and that Jaguar must have a higher-end car to compete with Bentley.

Tata nodded and wrote that down. His newly named Jaguar global CEO, David Smith, also took notes and asked questions.

The next day, Tata and his group came calling on Aron's dealership. Aron laid out a spread of fresh fruit, decorated with small Indian flags. Aron's wife made a trip to the grocery to buy Tetley tea to serve the group, since they learned that the Tata family owns the Tetley brand.

As Tata strolled through the dealership, his managing director for global automotive activity, Ravi Kant, sat down across the desk from Aron and asked a few questions.

"Can I tell you what he wanted to know?" Aron asks in mild amazement. " 'Mr. Aron,' he said to me, 'How many technicians do you have here? What is your profit margin on parts? What is your absorption rate?' " Aron says, referring to the percentage of a dealership's operating costs covered by the service department.

"What is your absorption rate! Can you imagine the head of an automaker bothering to travel around the world to sit here and talk to me about such day-to-day business details? And he wrote down my answers!"


Moving metal
Tata Group will need more than dealer enthusiasm to restore the fortunes of Jaguar and Land Rover.

In 2002, Jaguar sold 61,204 vehicles in the United States. Last year, it sold 15,683. Land Rover's U.S. sales have grown in the same period: 49,550 in 2007, compared with 40,987 in 2002. But Land Rover's sales are down 23.5 percent so far this year in the face of expensive gasoline.

Jaguar, when owned by Ford, had once hoped that its U.S. dealers would sell up to 100,000 vehicles a year.

Jaguar customers have embraced the just-launched XF sedan. More than a few dealers have reported they are sold out of their XF allocation for the year. A re-engineered XJ sedan is due next year. The oft-requested convertible, an on-again/off-again proposal since 2001, is supposedly again on the table.

Jaguar's and Land Rover's challenge is daunting because they compete against the best global brands: Mercedes, BMW, Lexus and Infiniti. BMW, for instance, now makes a fleet of Rover-fighting SUVs.

Moreover, Tata's new luxury auto business will not have the chairman's undivided attention. The family-owned conglomerate operates 98 companies in seven business segments.

But Tata obviously intends to make changes. It is moving the companies' North American headquarters out of California, where Ford placed them, to return them to the East Coast to be closer to their British factories. According to one of the dealers who visited with Tata, the Indian corporation indicated it wants to involve the fabled Italian design house, Pininfarina S.p.A., in more Jaguar designs.

Tata officials could not be reached to confirm that plan.


Nice hotel
On the West Coast, the new owners called on dealers in San Francisco. The group was treated to lunch at the Campton Place hotel. Not coincidentally, Campton is owned by the Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces group, another of Ratan Tata's holdings.

Over lunch, the new CEO Smith told Rover dealers that shedding vehicle weight to improve fuel economy will be a top Land Rover priority--probably by switching from steel to aluminum components where possible.

Between bites, a Jaguar dealer asked Tata to consider a new XK-E--the iconic British sports car of the 1960s that introduced many buyers to the brand.

According to those in the room, Tata smiled and nodded as he wrote down the suggestion, agreeing, "That would be an interesting project."

via  autoweek