Twelve Cars In A Year!

With March coming to an end it was time to sell the February car, or car #2 the Rover 416 Tourer.



As ever i thought i'd try it here on Retro Rides before offering it up for the general riff raff of ebay, and it got quite a lot of comments and love from you fellow Retro Riders, and various comments were made regarding the price of the beast...







All very valid comments, but although I would like to have thought that it would be worth £1000 - £1500, Mr xbollox is right, and when I bid on it I only went to £800, which I thought was probably too much, but as it looked so good I thought I'd chance it, however other bidders thought it only to be worth somewhere in the region of £500 which was lucky for me is where they gave up! Having a rare car (I think there's less than 300 left on the road) is not what makes it valuable, you could have the rarest car in the world, but if no one likes it, it will have very little value. Desirability is what give a car value and of all the 400 series Rovers the estate is probably the least desirable, with the coupé probably being the most. So although this is a very nice version of the 400 series Rover, the only way it's going to make really good money is if there are two bidders who just have to have it, and I'm not sure how likely that is, but we'll have to see. Having said all that, i watched as the listing matured through the week i started to think that maybe there was a chance that it would go for good money.

As a side note, and more about the selling experience on fleabay, rather than the owning and driving experience on the Rover, i find it a bit odd, that nearly a week on from the end of the auction listing i'm still getting emails from people asking if it's still for sale, and that they meant to bid but forgot, and that if the winning bidder doens't show up can i let them know as they'll buy it straight away! I've even had two people offering me £600 to sell it to them instead! The funniest part of all of this is that the exception of one of them, NONE of the rest of the people who have sent me these messages since the auction ended put a bid in in the first place!! C'mon people, it's an auction, get with the programme, bid, BID!! lol



2322 views, 635 watchers, 28 bids from 11 different bidders, i thought, i dunno, maybe this IS going to go well! However, in the end it went for just £530, which is more or less where i expected it to end. Unfortunately for me it initially cost me £552 to buy, so that left me £22 down on the whole deal, actually, after ebay relieved me £30 for the privalige of listing and selling the Rover on their site, it actually left me £52 out of pocket! Not ideal, but for £52 i got to experience one of my favourite Rovers of all time, plus, it's engine didn't blow up which all my friends kept telling me was going to happen at any moment! Not that there was anything wrong with the engine, but as soon as my friends saw my Rover 416 all i had were horror stories of Rover K-series engines, and how they're unreliable and the head gaskets going to go at any moment so on and so fourth. Well, i'm pleased to report that the head gasket didn't go at any moment, and infact it behaved and drove beautifully the whole time i had it, and i can honestly say that i think it has probably got many more years life in it as long as it gets looked after like it obviously has been in the past. So anyway, toward the end of March, March 20 to be precise i decided that it was time list the old girl on fleabay, stand back, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. Which i what i did. I always worry when i list things on ebay because of the seemingly high amount of people who bid without ever having any intention of buying and collecting their purchase, luckily for me, this time it didn't happen, and i had lots of questions from people who genuinely seemed interested in having it. The lucky winner was a lady who comes from Scotland, and she wanted to collect it next week. This wasn't good for me as i have other commitments next week so i asked her if she would like to have it collected, or come early. To my surprise she decided to fly down today, and drive it the 536 miles home, which means, all going well that she should be arriving back home about now, some 8 hours 38 minutes later... I got to hand it to her, this puts the people who say "I would have it if it was closer" in their place. Get out there people, buying a car and having a road trip is half the point and fun in owning a cool retro car isn't it?



And there she goes! She had asked me several times on the bay of E if the head gasket had been done, and i replied several times to say that i didn't know, as fastidiously looked after as this Rover was, i had absolutely no service history at all with it! I find this very strange because i would have thought that anyone who looked after their car so maticulously as this has been would've kept all the reciepts for any work they've had done, but i had nothing, nothing at all, well, except for the most recent MOT... Very odd! Anyway, more questions poured in, all asking about the head gasket, and timing belt, to which i replied that i had no idea. This i think is what may have put people off putting in a big bid, but i would rather tell people i didn't know what had been done to it, than give them false hope, and then have it let them down a couple of weeks down the line. But the lady who was the eventual winner collected it today, and after she and her husband gave it a good looking over, they said they were very pleased with it. I was actually glad that this couple bought it as they were obviously into their 400 series Rovers by the way they talked about them, and it looks like it will continue to be cherished and looked after like it obviously has been all it's life.

Anyhoo, i'm probably rambling on like a babbling fool when what you really want to read was what was it like to live with, yes? Well when i picked it up about a month ago it had just 102946 miles on it, and today, as it drove away from my tear filled eyes the odometer rolled over onto 103252 miles, which means in my month of Rover motoring i managed to cover just 306 enjoyable miles, mostly on the school run to be fair! This 306 miles used 34.8 foreign litres, or 7.65 English gallons, and cost me £40, this all means that i was getting about 40 miles to the gallon!! Not too shabby for the skool run!! Actually, now i'm looking at it, thats pretty freakin' good!!



Apart from the quite frankly amazing MPG figure, what else can be said for my month of cool Rover ownership, well, for me i've always liked the look of the 416 Tourer, i've always thought that you can see an element of BMW influence in the design, especially around the rear, and i like it, for me the only improvement in its looks that could've been made would've been if they'd made a two door version!

Inside...



MAN ALIVE THIS THING IS CLEAN!! Really really comfortable, and a very pleasant place to park your bum when you're driving!



Front seats, back seats, everywhere it was spotless, i even considered not letting the kids ride in it, but i thought it would be unfair of me to arrive at school in the Rover with the children walking behind me!



In the boot it was the same story, immaculate...



Even the the unseen bits where the spare tyre lives was pretty damn clean, although it has obviously had a puncture in it's life because that wheel's seen some road time.



Under the bonnet the little 1.6 litre Rover K-series happily purred away, had plenty of power, was a joy to drive, and didn't blow up! Much to my mates disappointment lol! It didn't use and oil, or water, and it didn't make it's own mayonaisse either, so it was all good I suppose though if you really wanted to make it a bit better you could do a turbo conversion, but in all honesty, for regular driving you don't need to, but the extra ooomph might be fun at the traffic light grand prix, if you should indulge in such things lol.



So in summary life with a Rover 416 Tourer was pretty damn sweet! The thing i can't work out is this though, one of my Brothers had an Escort estate of the same vintage as the Rover, and one of my Brothers had an Astra estate of the same vintage as the Rover, they were all of about the same trim level, but neither the Escort, or the Astra were anywhere close to being, as nice, plush, and refined as the Rover, so what the heck happened, why is Rover no longer trading? I cannot imagine why when Rover build cars like this, are they not still around? My Dad has a Rover 75 Tourer, and again, its a superb car, really nice, so why arn't they still building and selling cars now? I can only imagine that Rover never really got over the reputation they tarred themselves with in the seventies, that, and i believe that they were mis-managed by BMW when they took them over, and this really spelled the end for Rover, sadly this really is a shame when they could build and sell cars as good as this!

So that's two down, ten to go! NEXT!