If there’s one thing we can’t stand here at Speed:Sport:Life (not that there’s only one thing we can’t stand, I think you all know by now that there’s many, many things we hate here), it’s a tease. Indian manufacturer Tata Motors has spent the last few months playing a “will we/won’t we” game with the automotive community, looking for all the world like they’re going to snatch up Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, but never really quite committing to it. Well, they’ve finally finished off that third scotch, walked up to the bar and sealed the deal with Ford after spending the night forcing us to watch them try to sneak peeks down their dress.

On Tuesday, and in a move that shows you exactly how timely we can be with important news, I don’t mean today, I mean last week, Tata officially announced that it has purchased Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford for $2.65 billion. This completes the gutting of Jacques Nasser’s dream of creating a premium line of marques owned by Ford, as the only remaining brand in the Premier Auto Group is Volvo, which Ford has said is not for sale. As an added bonus for taking the burden of owning a car brand whose reputation is about to shoot up into geosynchronous orbit and is set to break all sales records away from Ford, Tata receives ownership of the Daimler and Lanchester brands through Jaguar and the Rover brand through Land Rover. Daimler, which is licensed from Daimler AG from an eons-old agreement, is used to make even more premium versions of the Jaguar line, and Lanchester hasn’t been used since the 1960’s, but they might be able to license the name. The hidden cash cow of this deal is quite possibly the Rover name, as Shanghai Automotive bought the rights to the Rover line but Ford exercised its right to buy the Rover name before SAIC had the chance, and I don’t doubt that they’d pay a good amount to be able to market their mediocre and relatively ancient designs with the name that was previously associated with said mediocre cars. Hopefully this will give Ford the shot in the arm it needs to pull itself out of its hole, and that Tata doesn’t proceed to run Jaguar and Land Rover into the ground.