This weeks Sunday Drive is another sixties classic, the Rover P5.
I never owned or even drove a P5 but, I've picked this as it is the first luxury car I ever remember being in and even now the sight of that sumptuous wood and leather interior takes me back to that time.
It was an old English white Rover P5 and, to be honest, I'm not even sure who's car it was, but the owner gave me, my mum, dad and two brothers a lift from the church to the reception after my cousin's wedding. I guess I would have been five or maybe six. Even with six of us crammed into this car it still felt like I was riding a magic carpet as the Rover wafted effortlessly from church to the reception hall - must have been all of two miles.
The P5 seemed to exemplify Britishness. Solid, dependable, understated, refined but not showy, it was the choice of transport for cabinet ministers and prime minsters - so much so that they last P5's produced were reserved solely for government use. Now, of course, Rover is owned by a Chinese company. What happened to this country which once made more than half of all the cars exported around the world?
2 comments:
The Chinese are notorious for paring everthing to the bone.
The new MG that's rolling off the line will look ok for the first year or so, then gradually cheaper metals will be used in it's construction, and the paintwork will get thinner and thinner.
Then, over an unusually cold wet winter, a whole parking-lot of them will be found dissolved into a rusting porridge, which the chinese will then re-cycled into rickshaws and sold back home.
.....maybe so, maybe not.
We hop globil warming will meen blitish winters will be warmar and dryur.
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