Dull, diesel, yet deserving…
So what does £200 buy you nowadays? A nice bottle of champagne, a weekend away, 650 or so cigarettes? Or a car. I’m not entirely new to the idea of Bangernomics, but a Rover 600 with at least a year’s life left in it and a full MoT for 200 sheets had to be worth investigating further.
The car is my mate Oli’s current daily hack, bought in April with 154000 miles for the sum named above to replace his 420 diesel – which he put 35,000 miles on in a year for £350. Having recently done over a thousand miles in this car, I am amazed at what Bangernomics motoring gets you. It’s a 620SLDi, so almost top spec too. Reasonably well equipped, comfortable, and one of few cars I fit in the back of with ample head and legroom.
I fit in the front fairly well too, but that’s less of a shouting point. Behind the wheel it feels fairly classy, big, yet it’s lacking the walnut and leather ambience that makes so many Rovers feel truly British. In something like an SD1 then fine, it’s called being modern, but in the Rover you get the sensation they’ve just stuck a Honda dash in and said “That’ll do”. Which they have. They’ve done the same thing with the passenger airbag too – it looks like someone strategically placed a newspaper on the dash and sprayed it to match the rest. In fact, the whole car is a Honda Accord in a bowler hat – which explains the sense that despite the very traditional body it’s a bit of a class pretender. This impression was further enhanced by our attempts to give the car sporting pretensions – to amuse the visitors to MG Saloon Day the grille sprouted an octagon and the word “Honest” thus giving the car three seperate identities to avail itself of. James Bond or what?
To drive, if we ignore my complete dislike of diesel, it’s by and large fine. Comfy for someone of over six feet, smooth from a passenger’s point of view, handles like the barge it is – but then it never pretended to be a sportscar. With it’s acceleration abilities that’s probably a good thing – on the driveway of a country house I planted it from a standstill and hit forty before running out of road – a stretch that in many cars would have me nudging the ton. I’m told by Oli that this is partly due to my driving style – you’re allegedly meant to rag a diesel a bit for any sort of result, yet I drove smoothly and at low revs like I do in petrol cars. I’m not the only one who found it slow – a friend with a 240000 mile example had a spin and came back complaining about the car’s lack of urge. “You have to rev the nuts off of Oli’s car as it has no torque!” was the response I got when discussing the car with him later. Said friend, a chap called Dan, is a bit of a whizz where engine work is concerned, and reckons either low boost or dodgy cam belt timing could be responsible. “You’ll have to have a go in mine one day to see how they compare!” he told me – I can only assume he meant his 620, as the Maestro Turbo he’d got with him wouldn’t have made for a fair comparison.
But for under half a monkey what do you expect – total perfection? Look, this car – this lump of metal conceived fifteen years ago that by rights should have reached the end of it’s useful life by now – has, over the course of a week, done Bristol to Sheffield, back to Bristol via Stafford, Newquay and back, and then Sheffield and back as well as round town driving. Over that week we must have done 1200 miles or so in at a purchase cost of sixteen pence per mile – and that’s assuming the car was bought for that week only. Over the time Oli’s had the car – which at the time of writing is about three months, the car has cost him two and a half pence per mile or just over two pounds a day. It might be slow off the mark but as a daily hack that’s a cracking good compromise.
The only real problem with it is this. It’s a very capable car, but because it’s a Honda in drag it’s so efficient it lacks the one thing that sets British cars apart from their German and Japanese rivals. It lacks a soul, a character. In a day-to-day hack it’s fine but I can guarantee that good though it is the 600 will never have an owners’ club, never be a classic. Consider this. I more or less lived in N407DNC for a week, yet the image illustrating this review is a press pic. I didn’t once take a good enough photo of it to publish, so have had to compromise. That really says it all about the 600 – it’s the background rather than the big picture.
