RIP Rover 220TD
It’s with a heavy heart that i announce the death of my beloved Rover 220TD. My first car, a 2 Litre Turbo Diesel, power steering, electric windows, roomy, remote central locking is soon to be no more. After what i’d call a minor bump where someone went into the back of me, the insurence company have written it off to the tune of £900. They did offer a cash settlement, however, in order to re-insure it, i would have to have undergone (at my expense) another MOT and engineers inspection – i suspect this would have made it far too expensive.
Despite the car being well looked after – full service history from new at 10k mile intervals with all required work undertaken and absolutely no issues, that’s what they valued it at. So i spent some time using all the fuel and stripping it of useful components – the newish Bosch Silver battery, GPS receiver, phone charger/holder, head unit, tweeter speakers, floor mats and other bits and pieces, including the odd momento. It also took me a week to find a new car. I had a plan. I had heard the adverts on the radio for http://www.chapelhouse.co.uk/ – offering 0%/£0 deposit 5 year finance, perfect i thought. I looked at the website, found a couple of lovely Citereon C4 Coupe’s (i think they look amazing), well within budget – one at £7,000 or £116 per month.
So i toddled off to the showroom – “I’m afraid you don’t qualify for 0% finance sir, the total repayment will be almost £9,000″. Normally that would be fine(ish if you don’t mind being stiffed for interest) but similar specification C4′s were on autotrader for £4.5-5k, i had assumed they’d just inflated the cost of the car instead of charging interest, so they could offer 0%. I told them to stuff it, i wasn’t going to pay nearly double. I could have found another dealer, on high interest finance and bought it for around £7k. However, i didn’t have time. So we went trailing around all kinds of back end dodgy dealers before i found a car.
There’s no easy way to say this, it’s a….
Cityrover.
Phew, glad i got that out in the open, i am the not so proud owner of a Rover Cityrover, or rather a Tata Indica with a Rover badge. It’s saving grace is that it only cost £995 and it’s a 2004 car which has 12 months MOT and 6 months Tax. Other than that, theres not a lot else to it, it’s just a simple, basic runabout, hopefully one which works.
It’s not without it’s quirks (let’s be honest, it wouldn’t be a Rover if it all worked), the fuel gague only works properly when turning left and the indicators don’t click in but hey, it works!
Rover made a big mistake asking £7,700 for this car (Sprite model) when they were buying them from Tata in India for £2k and they sell over there for about £3.5k. If they’d just sold it at £4.5k then it would have been massively popular.
It’s going to the garage next wednesday for a service and inspection, watch this space for how much it’s going to cost. If it’s ok then i’ll be re-instating the car pc – it’ll be the most pimped up CityRover in existance!
Bye all for now