The Mk2 was the first car launched by a newly privatised Rover - and it showed.
Not many people call their dogs Rover these days but it’s a fair bet that more than a few PHers will be calling this week’s Rover a dog. Would they be right to say that about this 214, though? Whatever your thoughts may be on British Leyland products, what you’re looking at here is a 43,000-mile one-owner hatchback with no massively alarming faults on the MOT history.
Our Mk2 was available from 1989 to 1997, though it was technically replaced by the more familiar R3 hatch in 1995. There was a four-door saloon version too, the 400, although the 200 was a five-door hatch and that was a big step up for the newly privatised Rover Group. It would be an overstatement to say that it transformed Rover’s image from bowler hat to baseball cap overnight, but it certainly moved it up to holiday trilby level.
Given the low mileage of our shed you wonder whether the head gasket has been changed. Although we’re not told in the ad whether it comes with a wodge of paperwork, you’d like to think that the single owner would have said yes to everything when it came to servicing. If the gasket hasn’t been done, well, that might make it one of the last in the country, if not the world, to be running the original item, so there’s some paleontological interest there.