Many centuries ago, people looked forward with breathless excitement to the arrival of the new reg plate letter and the chance to show off their new motors. When there was only one letter change a year, on January 1, there was real kudos in being the first on the road at one minute after midnight. With the covert indulgence of the supplying dealer, especially daring owners went out a day before a new plate became legal, or even two. Ooh missus!
After that, the plan was to keep your car looking as new as possible for as long as possible, which wasn't easy in the UK in January. Great days. Unfortunately, the creeping plague of the PCP deal has dulled the once bright thrill of having a shiny new car outside your domicile. Now, anybody can do it. The exclusivity has gone.
Fear not though because this week's Shed will rekindle that million-dollar new car buzz for the price of a poorly built sofa. Well, OK, it's not exactly new, but at 26,000 miles this could be the lowest mileage Shed ever. And OK it's not exactly a buzz either, as it's a Rover 25 1.4.
Stay with us on this one though. These cars are not that bad to drive. The chassis was more than decent and this one will be dirt cheap to run and insure on a classic policy. Yes, the electrics are about as reliable as the key fob - i.e. not very - but the loving single owner is highly likely to have given this car whatever it needed whenever it needed it. All the usual 25 wear-outy type stuff like steering arm bushes, water pump and dampers might well be original and, on such a low-miler, still serviceable.
Best of all, you as the new owner can anticipate the edgy tingle of the upcoming blown head gasket that so many K Series owners enjoyed back in the day. You could even run some sort of a sweep with your mates on when it might happen. If this has already happened and the gaskets have been done, you will find that the quick-warming K engine is very tolerant of a short journey lifestyle, as the owner of this one possibly found. Could it have been bought new by an auntie or some such who was under the impression that the '25' on the back referred to the weekly amount of mileage it was best not to exceed? That would fit with the thousand or so miles it has managed to accumulate on an annual basis since 2001. If it wasn't an auntie, then maybe a retired Rover bod?
Whoever it was, it's quite possible that our shed has never been west of Bridgnorth, east of Birmingham, north of Cannock or south of Bromsgrove because the garage selling this one is in Wolverhampton, a town (or city now, since 2000) that was named after Lady Wulfruna, who founded the place in 985AD. That's why the correct answer to the question 'what do you call somebody from Wolverhampton?' is not what you might be thinking but in fact 'a Wulfrunian'. True dat.
Speaking of Impression, that's the model name for this 25. It was one of an impressively scattergun collection of names for the 25 that included I (for the injected 82hp 1.4), Impression, Impression S, Advantage, Advantage S, iL, iXL, GTi, Spirit, Spirit S, Olympic, Olympic S, Olympic Impression, Olympic Impression S, iE (which was the noise you made when you broke down), and iS (which was what you joined when you'd broken down too many times). This may well explain why we now have to put up with made-up names for modern cars: Rover used up all the real ones back in the early 2000s. Remembering how much money he made on all the dot com names he mischievously bought at around that time, Shed is currently on the phone trying to find out who owns the rights to these fine names now, with a view to flogging them off at exorbitant prices to today's manufacturers.
We started off by yakking about registration numbers. Frustratingly, the 'cherished' P3 MMT plate on this Rover is not accompanying the car to its next owner. If your name is Martin Ming-Twerky you might be able to secure it for some extra cash, but you might also be surprised at how much that could cost. For fun, Shed looked up similar plates. He found P30 MMT for a reasonable-sounding £175 (reasonable if you're into this sort of thing), but single-digit plates such as P3 MTG are £775, which in this case is nearly the cost of the full car. If a reg number looks more like somebody's name rather than an acronym for a medical condition, P3 MKE say, the price goes up to £1,790. Funny old world innit.
Shed is fully expecting a good old-fashioned pasting for this one, so load up your keyboard catapults with the wordy equivalent of rotten fruit and let fly. Shed won't mind. He'll just sit there behind the oddly low-slung steering wheel of his own 160hp VVC-engined 25 sleeper, wipers on full, luxuriating in the evocative whiff of job-lot velour and mulling over Wolverhampton's city motto - 'out of darkness cometh light' - that was so amusingly reversed by eminent British electrical equipment maker Joe Lucas.
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