What's Wrong with the Rover 75?

Probably the best looking car around at the moment. An acquaintance sells them and tells me that the top of the range is about £27,000. Wow,- when the company that makes them will probably be defunct in a couple of years. Buy one second hand for buttons than. DaveK.

No need to wait. My father bought a 14 month old one last year from a dealer for half the list price.

I had a fully-loaded 2.5 V6 for a month as a courtesy-car a year or so back - did about

Avoid the earlier ones with the "KV6" engine; it's a nice engine-design but then the bean- counters were let loose on it and they cheapened the construction to the point of disaster. This engine has been a real nightmare to owners both of 75s and Land Rover Freelanders. It does sound kinda OK at about 5000-6000RPM though.

The 5-speed JATCO autobox on the V6 was something I could never get on with: even in "sport" mode it seemed obsessed with getting into top far too early (specially when you lift off slightly on entering a corner - you'd then hit the throttle again and it'd eventually kick-down to 2nd). It also defaults to grandad-mode when you start the engine [why couldn't they fit a latching switch to the sport/grandad-mode selector so it would stay in whatever mode you selected all the time? If it had been my car to keep I'd have built some sort of relay setup to automatically press the "sport" switch every time the engine was started!]

Personally I wouldn't buy a 75: I think they look bloated and ugly. They also have terrifyingly- steep depreciation [which I guess is likely to be a *benefit* if you're after buying a 5-year- old 100,000-mile one at auction for £595]

DaveK wrote

OK, thanks for the comments. I just wondered why there seems to be a reputation of unreliability circulating about Rover in general.

Because every survey shows them to be unreliable?