They think it’s all Rover
I hate that punny headline, but its apt. Some 14 years after my heart was broken by the closure of Mg-rover, I recently encountered a load of registered – but unused – Rover cars.
The first was in Bristol. I stumbled across a lovely garage with a showroom full of pre-reg MG and Rovers, from a 25 right up to a Rover 75 V8, with a 25 van, 45 saloon and MG TF in between. These were cars that had been delivered just prior to the unpleasantness in April 2005 and were registered in 2008 for legislative reasons. Half of the business premises were taken up with the finest examples of this dead marque, taking premium position near the entrance. I don’t think I’ve seen that many Rover 600s since I worked for European Motor Holdings.
However, don’t get the impression this garage was a museum rather than retail premises. On the forecourt there was a range of nearly-new Jaguar Land Rover products with the usual ‘premium’ German stuff scattered around. The place was doing a good trade and the workshops were busy. It just seems that the proprietor has a soft-spot for Rover products, like many of us. It really brought a tear to my glass eye.
A short time later, a friend and proprietor of a Mitsubishi garage called me out of the blue. He’d taken in a Rover 25 as a part-exchange. Again, this dealer was a Rover man until the bitter end. This particular Rover 25 was one of the very last made, a five-door 1.4 petrol with the Ford manual gearbox and finished in silver. The reason he was calling me was that he’d sold it as a special order back in the day and it had sat in a heated garage ever since. The mileage was under 1000.
‘I haven’t seen that many 600s since I worked for European Motor Holdings’
With that news, I was off to Scotland to view said vehicle. Parked on the forecourt, it really could have been 2005. The vehicle was immaculate and still had its OE Goodyear tyres, manufactured in April 2005, with moulding whiskers still on the sidewall showing its lack of use. I dearly wanted it, but what would you do with it – or, indeed, any of these cars?
The conundrum is this: do you take these cars and continue to cherish them as monuments to West Midlands engineering or do you use them as they were intended? And if you did use these cars, their unique selling proposition and value would be gone for good. And how would you value them? Both establishments were advertising these cars for their retail value back in 2005, but it’s a moot point whether that was a bargain or an outrage.
It’s a tricky one and I don’t have the answer, just the desire.