After a year of driving around in a 25Tid and suffering some aggro plus my first service, I can't say that I'm impressed with Rover build quality.
It's got a great engine, don't get me wrong, but is let down by the general state of the vehicle fittings. My old 200 was held together with nuts, bolts, real screws even, but all I find these days is scrivits scrivits scrivits. The bottom line, its a great engine looking for a car.
By the way, if anybody is wondering why the contents of the washer bottle seems to be going just a bit quicker these days, check the plastic connectors on the water line. They tend to splt right on the moulding pip, and being cheap plastic I suspect they tend to go rather quickly from new. Plastic fish tank air hose works just fine.
Which seesm to sum the whole problem up, cheap and nasty fittings. The dashboard squeaks, the internal door panels flex, I've lost count of the number of times I have had to clip back into place the door handle screw cover. The fuse box cover rattles in tune to the harmonics from the engine because it is so thin and flimsy.
Add to that the aggro over the year with the car eating a battery and poor main electrical connections inside the fusebox due to the use of metal hex bolts securing the cable/main fuse into a plastic fuse box and you can see why after a year of use I feel very fed up with the build quality.
And horror of horror, I'm looking around at other cars from other manufacturers. I know what you are thinking, all cars are made like this these days but during a recent local motor show at Worthing, at which Rover were noticable by their absence, I had the oppotunity to check build quality and quite a few alternatives, including Nissan and Skoda (of all companies) were light years ahead in the care taken during the design, quality and componants used.
All of which bodes badly for the new Indycar. My wife, who until recently worked in vehicle design at TWR (owned by Mr Walkenshaw, who managed to screw up all of his alledged unconnected companies when his F1 aspirations went futt) made the comment that as of late, the Rover range was designed to be assembled by unskilled labour with the miniumum of time expended putting the bits together whilst using the cheapest method and parts. TWR did some of the outbased design for Rover and the emphasis was always on cheap cheap cheap with constant re-designs to get the cheapest possible final product. It does not look good.
Rover, I know margins are tight, parts are expensive etc., I do sympathise with this but if you keep insisting to using the cheapest parts on the market, I can't see you lasting the course and it really will be Rover RIP.
PDH