Rover SD1

Regular contributor Eddy starts at the beginning with this pair: he remembers both being launched and has owned similar examples of each.

- Eddy Rafter

The rather handsome BMWarrived in 1981, a generallygood car which was a coolly efficient update on the outgoing coolly-efficient E12; the first 5 series. The upgrades were subtle and logical. The whole car, indeed the whole range, made sense. A buyer could start with a four-cylinder 1.8 and go up through the sixes to a snorting beast displacing 3.5 litres. All were perfectly reasonable choices in their respective market slots. In comparison, the Rover was, well, unreasonable.

Launched in 1976 (halfway through the reign of the E12) the SD1 came initially with only one engine, and exactly the wrong engine, you might imagine, to be fitting to your crucial new model just after the 1973 oil crisis. Although already an old design, and second hand to boot, the all-aluminium V8 that Buick had discarded was making itself very much at home in the various Rover models that used it, not to mention other applications such as the Morgan Plus 8. UK police forces loved it, especially in the P6 body, so the new model had big shoes to fill.