During a low mood the other day, Shed was looking at a website that promised to come up with an accurate prediction of when he might pass away. Unfortunately, once he’d finished tapping his medical and lifestyle details into the boxes and pressed Enter, the site told him he should have died eighteen and a half years ago. Immediately after receiving this news, he then had to deal with Mrs Shed, who was demanding to know why a load of inheritance investment sites had suddenly started appearing on her feeds and where the money was.
You’d think it would be easier to predict when Rover 75s might stop appearing in SOTW, but judging by the metronomic regularity with which good condition, low mileage cars keep coming up for sale, this is not something Shed is prepared to bet on any time soon.
The car you are looking at here was first registered in December 2004, which means it is both a facelift model – that refresh happening in the Spring of 2004 – and also one of the last 75s built, what with MG Rover going bust in April 2005. As part of the refresh, Rover binned off the Classic SE, Club, and Club SE specs and introduced a new Contemporary badge to accompany what was left, i.e. the basic Classic and the Mrs Bucket-sounding Connoisseur. In Rover circles, Connoisseur is usually abbreviated to Connie.
This one here is a Contemporary, which in Shed’s more rustic personal circle is shortened to Cont. What spec is that then? Well, you can never be entirely sure what kind of gear will be found inside a facelifted 75 as the company was constantly tweaking specs in its final months in a doomed attempt to keep itself alive. Of course, Shed will never let an absence of verifiable facts get in the way of a good (or even poor) story, so he is going to have a go at telling you what he thinks might have been in the Cont. You can join in the fun by playing Spec Bingo where you compare what he says to what’s on the pics, a process he can’t be bothered to go through. He’s saying there should be a black oak dash, black leather seats (heated and electrified, with memory settings on the driver’s side), rain-sensing wipers, rear parking sensors, Message Centre instrument pack, body-coloured door mirrors, 17-inch Star Spoke alloys, premium CD tuner with 6CD multi-changer and a Harmon Kardon 180-watt audio setup.
There was also Trafficmaster alert, which was quite a good blockage-warning system at the time. Shed thinks it might have been rebranded as Teletrac at some point, and that it’s probably not around in any recognisable form now. He does remember the boss of Trafficmaster doing quite well out of it. Hard to imagine there being many similarly lucrative opportunities for automotive inventors and entrepreneurs nowadays as times have changed, the auto manufacturers not leaving much room or electronic permissions for anything that’s not been invented or entrepreneured by them.
This 75 does look good with the typically excellent Rover paint standing up well to 20 years’ worth of attack by atmospheric toxins and exploding potholes. The car has only done 70,000 miles, fewer than a thousand of them since its last MOT test in January, which it passed with no advisories. The 174hp/177lb ft 2.5-litre KV6 engine is not known for its rip-roaring performance or Scrooge-like pumpish parsimony (26mpg), but it is a smoothie. It also has a decent reputation for reliability despite the switch from metal to plastic for the thermostat housing and variable inlet system componentry in the first Rover-redesigned-for-cheapness engines.
It goes without saying that the VED bill is not low at £430, but it could be worse, viz another £300 or so worse. In auto guise as here, you can expect the 2.5 Cont to creep into the eights over the 0-60mph run. The notional top speed was 134mph. Shed very much doubts that any 75 2.5 driver will have ever tested that out, but he would love to be proved wrong.
The nature and age of this car are best illustrated by the presence of just two buttons on the steering wheel, both of them for the horn. He presumes that pressing both buttons at once in straight-arm panic mode didn’t cancel out the noise completely. He would like to think that it would instead at least double the volume, not quite to a cardiac-inducing level perhaps but loud enough to awaken even the doziest fellow motorist or pedestrian.
He has said plenty over the years about the excellent ride quality and handling of Rover 75s, so he’ll be giving that topic a swerve on this occasion. Hopefully, others will be happy to vouch for it on the forum. His simple message is: try before you decry.
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