2006 Rover City Rover Goes For a Drive

proud to be sponsored by diamondbrite the car care products that have been keeping the furious fleet looking their best for a long time already to find all you need to keep your car clean and protected follow the links below to diamondbrite.cody uk forget the last real rover today you join me at the wheel of the last actual rover today for decades every time there's been a new rover brought out people would say it's not a real rover the last rover was the last real rover whether it's a 75 because that was a bit bmw whether it's a 200 400 because that was a bit honda whether it's the sd1 because that was a bit triumph from bl whether it was the p6 because that was too lightweight and rapid compared to the p5 it just goes on people are always ready to make a fuss and complain and then we have this the city rover not only the last real rover actually the last rover now it's not really a secret to say that this is basically a tartar indica or a tartar indigo depending on what market you're looking at with a different grill on the front so did they make it different enough to warrant calling it a rover or was it just a cheap sellout that deserve to die with the company now tartar have been making the indica since 1998 but it wasn't until 2003 it was brought over to the uk as the city rover now in order to roverize the car they did a little but was it enough it could have been more i'm perfectly honest so they did things that were pretty obvious for example the bumpers the grill i think the lights were changed at the front the suspension was completely revised for european and uk style of driving in our roads as well around the back the lights were changed as well so they're almost punto-like in the kind of tall strip it's a safety feature really so it makes them very high and visible and blends into the rear corner of the car now opening the bonnet there is the flimsiest bit of plastic you've ever seen and it looks like it's not actually hinged it's well i don't know what it is it's just flapping down below the dashboard and i'm told you have to get this exactly right or you're stuck we're in now we have the rather cryptically named 475 mpfi well this is pretty obvious multi-point fuel injection but 475 475 horsepower could be but it's not 72 horsepower 475 foot pound of torque probably not so what this is is a heavily reworked but peugeot derived 1.4 liter in fact it's a 1405 cc 8 valve engine which makes 85 horsepower and 88 foot-pound of torque which may not sound earth-shattering but a car as light as this is actually pretty decent performance in fact it goes north to 60 and 11.9 which is okay for the class and will hit 100 miles an hour and apparently it'll get 38 miles to the gallon so this whole front end was added by rover the car was built over in india shipped over here where it was roverized with things like this very very late style badge the viking ship completely paired down to a very simple design by the very end of rover now the front end it does have more than a whiff of punto one about it doesn't it second generation punto if you look at it this being a higher model does get fog lights and quite a lot of nice black plastic trim now the rover versions of these things all the 14 inch wheels and the better models got these alloys as well something that wasn't quite roverised enough though was deleting the tartar badges which is a bit of a no-no if you're trying to sell a premium product so here on the mirrors you've got a tartar badge here on the vin plate and on the bottom of the parcel shelf amongst other areas now this parcel shelf is where we start to run into quality issues as this one is a tad broken we also find on this particular car that the rear passenger door won't open from the inside the front passenger door won't open from the outside the driver's window is temperamental the check engine light is permanently on and the oil light is sometimes on other than that it's fine right so i've chucked the uh pasta shelf in the back so i can show you the boot because it doesn't lift up the boot itself is quite a good size it goes back far enough goes up high enough there's a bit of a lip getting things in but if you just put your shopping in here it's going to stop your milk and eggs falling out so fair enough no problem at all the owner has added a genuine rover accessory of this rubber floor mat which is really nice i've never seen one of these before slightly surprisingly it doesn't actually fit the boot it's not quite the same shape as the boot despite being a city rover genuine accessory but hey it's a nice thing to have though i would definitely go and source one of those if i had one it cuts around the jack in there so it's all actually shaped properly what else do we have in here well good news is we've got under the floor a full-size alloy spare wheel proper proper spare wheel and we'll jack and toolkit uh tucked underneath this slam panel here that's nice to have that's got quite a sporty tyre on that spare wheel as well you saw i've been enjoying this car in the past over here on the right hand side there is a courtesy light always a good thing except it's not a switch courtesy light with the door it's switched with a switch so you have to manually walk over and turn it on if you want to see stuff in the dark now these rear seats do fold down completely you can either fold them once and have a flat load space or you can go like full on fiat multiple of vauxhall zephira and double fold them unfortunately the latches and catches are so fiddly we're not going to do that today there you go we did it it's a 4060 or 60 40 split so we've only done one half but there you can see massive massive load area very very practical in such a small car right so here we have the interior and wow for a small car it's an impressive amount of space in here the headroom is just vast got a pretty good elbow room lots of room for your feet and your knees there's nothing virtually no transmission tunnel but obviously front-wheel drive but you know a console so yeah you're very very spacious indeed you feel a long way from the windscreen as well you don't really feel penned in at all now there was plenty of criticism at the time the carbs knew in terms of the quality of the plastics and the fit and finish and i have to say that some of it was justified there's a panel here it's quite clever how the panel for the glove box and the panel that sits around the bottom of the steering column are interchangeable on left hand right hand drive so they've done a clever bit of design there unfortunately the fitment on the driver's side one isn't particularly special the airbag pod on the passenger side does look a little bit of an afterthought that was kind of tacked in and plonked on top rather than integrated fully i'm guessing on cars without a passenger airbag you have a full width oh t-shelf basically now this model is a style so it's the top of the range and gets everything apart apparently from the metal uh foot pedals which were available in a lower level car but not on the top level car go figure so starting with our little tour on the door first of all this is a nice one so we got the same velour fabric velour in 2003. that's a good thing um here in the your door cod a fairly solid door grab handle an okay door bin a speaker now apparently the speakers were terrible on this coin and has just changed them for some aftermarket ones because you want some decent sounds in here and then you have one of the few uk upgrades which is the surround here for the door handle isn't this kind of faux carbon fiber effect stuff which is also found in the center of the dashboard as well the main plastic body of the door card is a little bit rattly and tacky and when you shut the door it shuts really firmly with a good bang but there's a little bit of an echo into the door which makes you think it could have been i don't know more solid error down to the right of the steering we've got a little panel of four buttons which are kind of our secondary controls rear screen heater um rear wash wipe front and rear fog lights and don't forget front fog lights because it's the top of the range car but every time you push on these buttons the entire panel does move with it but above that we have got big ventilation there's no door ventilation going up to the window but there is a side vent which is always on so it will always blow a bit of vent onto the window and try and keep it demisted these vents are big there are just four nice sized blowers and this car has got air conditioning it's top of the range car loaded with all the options so we've got air con on this particular model which does blow very cold indeed now we have the steering wheel now this is a leather wheel which you think wow that's pretty cool um now because this car was an indian built car originally it's not cow's leather it's pig's leather which is very soft and supple quite nice feeling material if you buy a pig skin wallet that's kind of a luxury item however it's quite thin though and it's notably worn off here we hand sits most although the owner has now picked up a brand new sealed fresh one from rimmers for like 10 pounds 10 pounds yes 10 pounds for a leather steering wheel that's amazing now one thing which is less amazing though is the rover badge in the middle which looks a little bit cheap it's not got very much detail in the viking ship and it kind of is a bit like when aston martin's have got the aston logo glued over the ford or volvo badge on the key um has got a horn and has got an airbag let's try the horn yeah that's a suitable horn for this car we're in keeping and finally down below this whole area we've got our headlamp angle thing for weight in the boot and a great big trough under under here so you can pile all manner of items under the steering wheel and in front of you looking through the wheel we have got our pod of dials white race inspired dials big center speedo and then interlocking outer ones look a little bit kind of honda ish in a way height perhaps inspired by honda i quite like the double cluster on the right with the feel and the temperature gauges they look quite good and the bright red needles looking very racy indeed claiming to go up to 125 miles an hour i suspect it may not know where not to 100 now below the dials we've got a nice row of lights which hopefully aren't on too much but in the center the one thing confusing me at first is the padlock for the alarm an actual old-fashioned led in the middle of it very old-school technology because it's printed like a sticker onto the panel i thought there was a problem with the central locking when i first climbed into the car it's not it's it's ink it's stuck on there now we come to the center console now first of all we have to put this out of the way there's no cup holders where was my big tea cup gonna go i don't know what were they thinking but okay that's a disappointment but 10 out of 10 a plus star for the t shelf look at the status okay it does rattle a bit when you bang your hand onto it so i won't do it anymore but it is huge you've got lots of room for two cups of tea you've got sandwiches you've got swiss roll you can put a proper victoria sponge on there and you've got height to cut it as well so we're very happy with that and it has a little rubber mat so after your picnic you can take the crumbs outside shake them outside the car everything is caught off here this is a great picnic mobile less great is a little digital clock in front of it it does look a tad cheap at hours minutes and and zeds because zed's i look at the owner for explanation he's no clue either he's read the handbook so it's zed the month hang on i'm gonna sound like i'm not researching this car at all right now but um okay the clock is actually broken so um i can't tell you what z stands for maybe it's a lap timer i don't know i don't know but how has minutes and said maybe it's nap time he can set a nap timer on it porsche's got a lap timer city rover's got a nap timer i don't know where am i going with this anywho right now the center control panel has got the same uh carbon fiber effect pattern on it oh it brightens the interior but otherwise it's all just elephant skin everywhere which is quite hard to the touch so it's nice to have a little bit of brightening this is quite a nice thing to have the hazard warning lights are in the center of it that is a slightly small plasticy button but it does the trick and it's easy to find and below that we've got our good old-fashioned heating and ventilation controls also with air conditioning which is excellent uh different texture plastic again here and moving down into the blou punk lagoona cd36 stereo which we think is probably a dealer fit option it certainly looks of the period of the car so it's a nice thing and it seems to work quite well below that again we've got a lighter socket 12 volt and frag lighter and a little pull out ash tray which is just right for sweet wrappers and then a little cubby hole down the bottom which is perfectly sized for an iphone to sit in and well maybe not just about the right size for my phone to sit in and not quite give you siri instructions then we have the window winders because this is a top-of-the-range car style and select got four electric windows the two lower models didn't they have wind up keep fit windows this is good though but clever budgetary saving putting one panel of electric window switches here in the center means i haven't got to have a bank of window switches here and one on the door now this is a slightly curious placement for the airbag deactivate switch normally something you hide in the glove box on the door shut so it's not a main control that you use very often and so we kind of hide away this is here front and center right in front of the gear shift so uh yeah they chose to put it there then we have the gearbox all cars came with a five speed manual which is a good thing in my book this is a little bit rubbery it's a bit like the old rover r8 gear shift in that there's a little bit of play a little bit of rubberization in the selection so you do feel a bit like it's not as accurate as you perhaps like it to be and of course we've got a nice manual chunky handbrake and that's most of your controls next to the accelerator there's a big cut out for your foot so your foot can kind of slide off accelerating room for your toes and on the passenger side they've mirrored it so left and right hand drive cars have exactly the same mirror option that i'm going to change that on the production line at all one lighting which is a very rovers thing indeed which makes you feel like you're driving a proper rover certainly an r8 series rover is the fuel cap release and boot release down here little tags by your right foot now the last thing to look up here is of course the sun visors which do feel a little bit flimsy and there are some fairly exposed screws which is something you wouldn't really expect in a car later than say 1990 really a little venti thing you can put stuff in for keeping on the driver's side and there is a mirror on the passenger side which is hidden quite creatively by a magnetic flip down cover right typical of many small cars climbing in the back you do have to watch your nose as you get in but once you are in the headroom isn't too bad but there's a slightly claustrophobic feel because it does wrap around you in the headlining a bit uh legroom and foot room oh brilliant actually and i've got this seat set quite well back and they're very very thin seat backs to be honest so they're not taking much room out um something about the car because of its kind of fairly cheap origins you can see lots of stuff that you wouldn't necessarily see or would not expect to see on a rover in the northeast for example all the bracketry mounting the seats the bolts holding the seat belts in they're all exposed even the screw heads here on the um the rail in the bottom on the plastic trim that's all exposed as well one area they did try and disguise the uh exposed fittings with was in the center of the tunnel they have velcroed a bit of carpet over the back of it and that's not really something you would expect to see on a car a rover's level this is something you'd expect in a real budget car not on a rover but they've tried to make up for it with a bung a bit more equipment in you've got a little folding out ashtray like in a 1970s ford always just like playing with them when we're kids electric windows slightly uh curiously placed and feeling switch actually in this little alcove here because the lower options as i say did have keep fit windows and you've got a identical door handle and locking switch to the front but again we've got exposed countersink screw um heads in these handles which is not what rover should be selling in the naughties that's not good enough rover right let's take it for a drive and see what it's like on the road so fit and finish aside the big question is what's this thing actually like to drive well let's find out well the 85 horsepower engine is actually not bad it's got a bit of an old-school 80s almost vibe to the way it delivers its power it's quite throaty and raspy sounding but it feels like it's got a fair bit of torque for the weight of the car so you do pull away quite happily to move up into the higher gears pretty rapidly and not too high a speed and it will push you to relatively rapid speed quite quickly which is where things get awkward because the suspension really isn't quite as good as the engine if i'm perfectly honest because not only does it lean like a ship in a gale on a corner if we just pause a second and join us rejoin at a bumpy road okay so we've got some weird undulations in the road here and the car feels like it's almost going to oh my god he took off it's actually really dangerously out of control it's hilarious oh my word so yes as well as not having a great deal of body control when you do hit a corner wow does this thing lean it's hilarious it is a city car obviously so it's not designed to be driven hard through the country lanes but even so when you compare that to things like the punto and the fiesta which were rivals it's a very different experience while we're talking about cornering let's talk about the weighting of the power steering it's very odd because as you get into a corner it feels like it might be waiting up as sometimes power systems do but the way it does it oh it closes now it's better a bit um it's almost jerky so you find yourself having a difference in pressure halfway through the corner which makes steady cornering a little bit of a challenge [Music] everything every control on this car is feather light the pedals under my feet feel like they're almost not there the power steering is ridiculously heavily assisted considering how small and light the car is you can almost do without power steering to be perfectly honest the switch gear just feels so light it's ridiculous it's um not like any previous rovers switch gear like the ray had the famous honda civic stuff which was as tough as anything this has got a slightly flimsier feel and the plastics are really slippery it's interesting how the suspension does handle the bumps and the turns because it was re-tuned to european and uk standards now shifting gears on this thing is a very familiar exercise for me because it feels exactly the same as my rover coupe although that is 27 years old and has 130 something thousand miles on it this is not particularly accurate it's quite a weird vague feeling thing it's a little bit odd and coupled with a very very high biting point on the clutch which from old reports appears to be standard it's a strange experience not conducive to rapid road driving but for all its other fit and finish and quality control floors the actual drive isn't too bad it does feel like a rover of old in some respects the engineers have done a bit to to make it roverized the seating position is actually pretty good the visibility is amazing it's like a massive goldfish bowl you're sitting in and surprisingly there are virtually no squigs and rattles in the thing and admittedly the doors do clang a bit when you shut them but the plastics aren't rattling the air conditioning blowing ice cold and keeping the windows nicely de-misted as well now i forgot to mention the brakes because when i was talking about the gearbox i said the gearbox wasn't particularly special well the gearbox is probably okay it's just the linkage isn't that amazing also a little on the scary side are the brakes let's get down to so we're to sit at a nice steady 30 miles an hour fourth gear breaking clutch down whoa it's it's okay but it doesn't give you any kind of feeling of confidence you are actually going to stop and the pedal does have a rubbery feel to it so it's something you get used to but when you first climb in and drive it you do feel a little bit cautious of the brakes now the owner of this car hasn't had it very long and in fact just paid shy of a thousand pounds for it very recently but that is for a pretty good condition example with a year's mot on it and i can't condone this but he has been on the rumour brothers website quite a lot and bought every possible accessory he can not that i'd do a thing like that okay this is an impromptu not to 60 on the roundabout okay an order 35 on the roundabout i did not do 30 very quickly indeed but unfortunately just kind of ran out of puff much beyond that but again it's a city car so it's kind of to be expected now sales weren't a massive success as rover had hoped during 2003 and four so towards the end of 2004 they dropped the price by 900 pounds and into 2005 they started adding more kit as standard as well the problem was an entry level indian car is below entry level for entry level car in europe rover knew that and they took a lot of steps to bring it up to par really and so their problems were kind of two-fold first of all was the initial quality they had to work hard to make the car good enough and it's it's an okay car but it's not quite as good as your position and the second problem was perception the public knew about the car's origins and it was also known that rover were paying around 3 000 pounds per car for this but they're starting to sell them at six and a half grand minimum up to seven and a half grand at first and so the public didn't take kindly to that they felt they were being ripped off by rover they were just cashing in on buying it cheap flogging it high and of course there was the famous top gear incident rover wouldn't lend top gear a car to review they knew that top gear weren't going to be kind to them no matter how good the car was so james may went undercover not very undercover i have to say james may in a mustache is still james may borrowed one and absolutely slated it called it the worst card ever driven in the history of the program and that really was a death knell for the car so why did rover do this why did they put this car into the market in the uk well they hadn't had a proper super mini since 1998 when the metro went off sale they tried to fill that void with the 200 but then the 25 by doing things like dropping it down to a 1.1 liter but it was typical of their size management it never quite fitted in any particular category and so the 25 was taking on everything from the smart car to the focus meanwhile the 45 was taking everything from the focus to the mondeo it was a sizing system that didn't really work so they needed something to fill the void the problem was the problem was of course that rover mg rover by then the problem was that rover were squandering money on ridiculous vanity projects the svr the v8 75 they needed to put every penny they had into a new super mini and into a replacement for the 2545 but no they were throwing money in the wrong direction and if this was a cheap fix that didn't quite last long enough to save the company in terms of safety it's as good as you should expect for a city car in the early noughties driver airbag came as standard on the top model the style the passenger airbag came as standard as well the other models had that as an option as well side intrusion bars in the doors pre-tensioners on the seat belts anti-submarine seats so it was covering the bases as well as it sure to now you might think this car looks relatively european for an indian car and that's because it was designed by the idea the institute of development of automotive engineering you know what that means i mean someone really wanted to spell idea oh shield gag if you remember that tv show they're based in chirrin and they're responsible for some pretty good cars things like the alpha 155 the 90s lancia delta the fiat tipo for example later on a lot of smaller cars such as the uh kia rio and in fact the tartan nano as well i'd love to get tata nano on here oh we've got rattle now we didn't have a rattle before we've got a rattle now despite being quite tall and very very thin on the back are pretty comfortable they're well padded they've only got basic adjustments of front and back and rake on the rear but still quite supportive not supportive in like a racing seat but you know it's nice to sit in and incredibly there was a leather option available of course like the steering wheel that's pigskin as well it's an astonishingly rare option though oh check out the color on that gtv nuvola blue that was a really expensive option so in typical rover style it was positioned not quite right in the market in terms of price it was up against things like the ka and the citroen c2 but in terms of size because it's absolutely massive in here it is more akin to things like the fiesta the ibiza so in a way you could upscale yourself up size yourself to a bigger car for less money so all in all it's not a bad car the problem is it's not as good as the rivals which is something the buying public i think we're aware of buying one now is certainly a curiosity it's a car to buy because you like rovers you like something interesting and different it's definitely a car worth adding to a collection and having just the posterity because no one else is going to save them so hats off to the owner of this car who has bought this car and is looking after it and when there are very few of these left in not long this one will still be safe well thanks for joining me today in this the very last rover the city rover it's a car i've often thought that maybe i should add to my collection as like the final piece in the puzzle if you like i've never quite done it maybe i will one day if you've enjoyed this please hit like please hit subscribe all the usual things share on facebook share on twitter you know the drill and see you again next time driving something completely different also looking at this is the engine figuring you saw exactly what i expected

Channel: furiousdriving

Views: 36,653

Rating: 4.8925958 out of 5

Keywords: car, cars, blog, vlog, retro, classic, classic car, retro car, motoring, rover, city rover, cityrover, city car, Tata, indica

Id: MYVon2WpuhQ

Length: 28min 32sec (1712 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020