This May Be The Most Brilliantly Terrible Car I've Ever Learned About: Quick Jump
It’s funny to witness all of the media praise over a certain model that us Americans have almost never heard about. Here, car people have probably heard of the Rover SD1 from this hilarious moment on Top Gear where the door opened but not really. That is really just a morsel of the SD1’s eventual demise.
From a glance, it embodied everything that modern European motorists would want. Sleek looks with a low roofline that didn’t compromise on space, comfortable seats, a dose of standard features deemed luxury at the time, and a V-8 with enough power to keep up with the Germans on its famed Autobahn.
It quickly came into popularity with the buying public, as well as the police, who could shake off questionable build quality when it could chase down and bring vigilantes back to the local nick at a moment’s notice. Mechanically, it was durable thanks to the V-8 drivetrain whose greatest highlight could be shown here:
Critics ate up the Rover SD1, naming it the European Car Of The Year for 1977 among other accolades. It’s easy to love when it’s brand new. Problems began to mount when the shine wore off.
In the 1960s, the British Motor and Leyland Motor corporations merged to build passenger cars, trucks, and busses as a positive purview to the domestic market that had fallen behind the rest of Europe. BMW and Mercedes-Benz were pulling ahead when it came to profits and its ability to move mass amounts of volume, leaving the Anglo competition behind. So this move was a notion to catch up.
What happened instead is that British Leyland, as it became known to be, broke into two worlds: management and the people responsible for building cars. When strikes broke out over pay—because history tells us factory workers always want to be compensated properly—a compromise was difficult to find, resulting in an unwillingness to build cars to the quality they deserve, which reflected in the Rover SD1.
The SD1 isn’t alone in this misfortune. It is however, the vehicle that reaped the greatest benefits of engineering and critical acclaim, only to become the culprit of dire reputation. It was the equivalent of Apple launching an iPad on us, and then the factory reducing it to an Etch-A-Sketch.
The Rover SD1 was the product of a clustermess of conglomerate management. When it failed, British Leyland had to rely on this to pull it out of the muck:
That same mismanagement resulted in the other greatest victim that was supposed to be a hit. Early sketches previewed a very different Allegro that, if it weren’t for business interference, might’ve had a greater outcome for British Leyland:
When both cars failed, the British manufacturing industry collapsed to mark the end of the affordable Anglo-backed automobile. Only the most expensive Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Jaguars, and Land Rovers have survived. However, these days, ownership of the established brands lie outside of the U.K.
All of which is to say that cars are one of the most democratic processes to take part in, be it design, engineering, development, building the factory tooling, manufacturing at the hands of union workers, the people who buy them. Something can go wrong along the way that can make, or break, a car’s legacy.
Consider the Rover SD1 as the prominent example, a car that was brilliant just as it was terrible. Not because of the extreme dedication the engineering team committed to perfect its design and performance, but when the time came to get it into people’s hands, those responsible for putting it together were complicit in their deciding its lack of self-worth.
Wouldn’t it have been worth to build it to the best of their abilities so that management could see they deserve the pay raise? Maybe they tried, maybe they didn’t. It’s tough to know for sure.
The Rover SD1 doesn’t share the same legacy as the Allegro, however. It was briefly sold in the U.S. and enj an epic racing career with a handful of championship wins under its belt in multiple countries. There’s a video on that too:
All of which makes me curious to drive one. Maybe an Allegro, too. Anyone fancy a trip to the Cotswolds?
-TA