Poll: The BIG Rover debate

[DRZ]

You have a rover, clearly you are going to try and justify the money you have poured into it.

That is all well and good but the problem is pretty obvious: you have a rover. They are right up there with the worst when it comes down to reliability. It appears to people who had the sense not to buy one that they are held together by mayonnaise, cigarette papers and a lot of prayers.

They are LEGENDARY for their SPECTACULAR unreliability and disintegration. If it wasnt at least partly true, such a reputation would not exist.

Think about it!

P.S. I voted for the "Rovers are a heap of ******* ****" option.

 

[50/50]

They suck and always have, End of.

 

[atpbx]

I'm not liking all the comments about brake failure.

What caused them to fail atpbx?

It had just been picked up from a service at a Rover dealer, so any number of things, he was always on the phone to the dealer saying things like:

"this is supposed to be a 140mph car, the ******* thing wont stop from 40mph, let alone 140mph, now get it fixed".

 

[Enfield]

Can't really comment, but my sisters boyfriend owns a Rover 200 Vi and the headgasket went on it.

 

[DaveyD]

Really? It was YEARS behind the cars it was trying to compete with in the latter stages of its life - the Clio, the Mk5 Fiesta, the Yaris.

But isn't the 25 a Focus sized car?

My experience and view of Rover and their cars are that their cars aren't *that* bad, but I doubt I'd ever buy them. They were pretty bland cars externally and horrid internally. After being in a ZR, it wasn't too bad inside, but was rather underpowered and had shocking build quality.

Problem with the company, was partly the workforce, but also the company and partly BMW. Having so much debt hindered their product development, so they were stuck in a money pit and couldn't really get out of. The SV X-Power thingy was a mistake, as they could have put money elsewhere for that.

 

[SinaiSound]

My mk Rover 400 is ok. People are always suprised when they get in and sit on the leather seats. Headgasket went in mine, but that was because of a leaky waterpump I didn't get sorted for months - just kept topping it up.

Battery went last month and the gearbox is noisy, but other than that it's ok

Would I buy another rover - maybe. The 75 looks like a good car.

 

[Morba]

how many cars use k series engines?
how many of these cars have known HG failures?

im betting its pretty much all of them

 

[agw_01]

DaveyD, that's a good point about the engine in the ZR. You do have to remember it's a 1.4, and for it's engine size it does perform rather well. You need to keep it in the 'power' band to get good performance out of it, but I've got no doubt in it keeping pace with quite a few 1.6 and 1.8's on flat roads.

You have a rover, clearly you are going to try and justify the money you have poured into it.

That is all well and good but the problem is pretty obvious: you have a rover

Thanks for your input DRZ I know it's only a Rover, but that's the problem... it's not only a Rover, it's MY Rover. You could say that about any car... it's only a Mondeo, or it's only an Astra... or for the more exotic people in our audience, it's only a BMW X5

I think that's a lot of the problem. People were put off with the HG problems. Truth is it wasn't that big a problem. I'm not going to deny that the HG's failed, because I know full well that there was a problem, but people put so much emphasis on it that it really ruined the reputation of the K-series, which is a very good engine.

As for them being unreliable, you'll get a bad batch with any manufacturer. I know a lot of people who've had very little problems with their Rovers. Including my dad, who owns a 1997 820 which is nearing 300,000 miles

 

[Matmulder]

Rovers are not bad cars by a huge margin. They had some excellent engineers and technicians - given the chance, they made some excellent motors in the past, and even right upto the death.

The Rover V8 - used in tons of sportscars over the years - so good EVO maggy even did huge article on how good it was when it was finally discontinued. TVR's, Morgans, Range Rovers etc etc

The K-series - prone to HGF maybe - but still fantastically engineered. Light and powerful, can produce 200bhp reasonably reliably. Used in engless cars from the Lotus Elise to the Caterham, MGF and Rover 200. The whole HGF "problem" is overhyped too.

Then in recent years they made the ZT V8, which is meant to be as good as an EVO8, but in a totally different approach. The 75 range as a whole were decent cars.

The SV-R was supposed to be fantastic too, if wildly overpriced.


But yeah, they made some turds like the City Rover, and the lack of revised models was there real downfall. Its just a shame that they had the engineering capability to make some really fantastic cars - but their management decisions were woeful. BMW raped them of their best asset (The new Mini) and Ford took Range Rover too, leaving Rover with the MG badge. Again, the engineers made a good job of the ageing 25/45/75 turning them into pretty decent sporty cars - but they needed NEW cars, not rehashed ones.

 

[Lopéz]

I voted for the "They're ok" option. I had a 213S, pre K-series Honda engine so no bother there. But the rest of the car wasn't really up to the job (suspension, brakes) - then again I tend to work my cars pretty hard.

There are better and worse out there, but I can't think of any Rovers I'd get a semi over.

 

[Scania]

Ok, so the gearbox went and cost me £180 but so what? I broke it. If I hadn't been so hard on it, then it wouldn't have died.

I drove my old 318i in a way many people would'nt believe. I thought nothing of clutchless slam changes when I was out sucking the last ounce of go out of it, it also was frequently ragged extremely hard by a racing driver friend of mine.

Why did'nt it break? Imo, it was properly screwed together in the first place, not a mish mash of parts bins from two very different manufactuers.

I know of a few Rovers, a couple of them are "J" registration like my 3 is without exception, not one looks a patch on mine.

I'm an HGV driver, I've been in & out of Longbridge more times than I can remember, the efficency (or sheer lack of) was staggering,hours waiting to unload, petty jobsworths all over the place, I noticed with interest, many of the said jobsworths cars parked on the surrounding roads were not Rovers, despite favourable employee purchase schemes.

In Germany, The cheapest way to buy & own a BMW or, Mercedes is to work for them.

Rovers had poor build quality when compared to their direct competition not to mention completely outclassed - compare a Mondeo to a Rover 400!
Market forces (read Drivers that would love to buy British if it was'nt a load of crap) dictated the rest. Rover is history.

As I recall saying at the time Rover did its RMS Titanic impression, Rover cars were aptly named, the name of a Dog.

A dog that deserved to be put down.

Sad to say, but I'd be very surprised if Jaguar isn't in the same situation one day.

 

[[TW]Fox]

But isn't the 25 a Focus sized car?

No.

25 = Fiesta sized
45 = Focus sized - it just looked bigger becuase of the way the hatchback was.

 

[blueboy2001]

They made some good products - for example the 600 and the 75.

Hmm, for those two examples is it not that Honda and BMW made some good products, and allowed Rover to stick their badges and plastic wood on them?

The fact that Rover is no longer trading says it all for me. If you make a good product people will buy it, regardless of its previous brand image - Skoda being a prime example. Ok so they had the backing of Volkswagen, but Rover had the backing of BMW - one of the most profitable car manufacturers in recent times and who obviously know how to run a business in the industry and if they couldn't turn it around then nobody could.

 

[Muncher]

Fox, the Rover 25 is well ahead of all bar the latest generation Clio in my book.

My sister has got a W reg Clio and it's a pretty rubbish little car. The build quality and reliability is awful, it is made of the cheapest and nastiest materials, is gutless and no fun to drive.

 

[Akira]

Two of the best cars I've ever had were two SD1 2.3S's. Built like bricks, easy to work on and reliable straight sixes with every toy. The first one I had was smashed driver's side first into a concrete lamppost at about 50mph and both my passenger and I walked away with scratches. I learned two things that day. Drive big cars, and sensibly. On the other hand the two Metro's that my gf had over the years were the worst piles of rusty offal I ever had the pleasure of abandoning.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Fox, the Rover 25 is well ahead of all bar the latest generation Clio in my book.

You are joking, right? You are telling me that Honda, Ford, Nissan etc etc couldn't, even in the last few years, make a better car than one Rover introduced in 1995? I know you owned a ZR with a 1.4 litre engine, windup windows and no remote locking and thought it was awesome and paid £9000 for it, but see beyond that for a moment

 

[Scania]

Fox, the Rover 25 is well ahead of all bar the latest generation Clio in my book.

Your book has few pages.

 

[Del Lardo]

In it's day the Rover 200 series (of AGW's era) was a damn fine car. Unfortionately after that Rover never seemed to keep up with the rest of the crowd (there are obvious exceptions mentioned above).

In it's era the K series engine the was an engine that quite a few manufacters would have loved to get their hands on. It was light and produced a very good amount of power for its deplacement. It can still provide a lot of fun to this day

 

[agw_01]

make a better car than one Rover introduced in 1995

Really Fox, forget when a car was 'first' introduced. They used the 200 as the base model for the ZR and 25 because it was popular and sold well.

Age isn't everything you know.

Del Lardo backed my point up in the above post. If the K-series was such a crap and unreliable engine, then why do a lot of people use it in the cars named above?

And extracting a stable 200bhp from a 1.6 or 1.8 engine... that shows some good mechanical work.

 

[[TW]Fox]

Really Fox, forget when a car was 'first' introduced. They used the 200 as the base model for the ZR and 25 because it was popular and sold well.

No, they used the 200 as a base model for the ZR and 25 becuase they were too strapped for cash to do anything else and couldn't afford to develop the all new car they badly needed.

Age isn't everything you know.

It is when you compete in a fast moving market. You think BMW would still be selling huge numbers of cars if they were competing in todays market with the E36 3 Series, E39 5 Series and E38 7 Series? Of course not.

How many Mondeos would Ford be shifting if they were still selling Mk2's?

Time moves on, competitors move on, Rover didn't.