The next car was about as different as could be. A 1957 Rover 105R; least common, and least desirable (I didn’t know that at the time), of the Rover P4 series. With only 3,500 of them built between 1957 and 1959 that doesn’t rate as wildly succesful even by the standards of the time. The difference from the Reliant wasn’t just that it had a full complement of wheels; this was intended to be a superbly built luxury car. While the doors on the Reliant went “ Clang, KerSproing!”, the doors on the Rover whispered “click, thunk”. While the trunk lid of the Reliant felt like Shredded Wheat and resin, the trunk lid of the Rover was hand-beaten aluminum with an elegant sprung counterbalance.
This car had leather and walnut. A little drawer under the passenger’s side of the dashboard pulled out to reveal a fitted tool set. It even had a radio, with tubes and a large glowing box in the engine compartment. This was real quality in the traditional English style.
It was quite the car! Big (for England) and at first glance it looked pretty nice. Under the hood was a smooth and quiet 2.6-liter straight 6 engine with two large SU carburetors (it was a while before I discovered that the terrible throttle response was because only one of them was contributing to the proceedings).
So why was it cheap enough for me to be driving it? Well, it was old, it had a backlog of deferred maintenance, it was rusty around the edges and truth to tell, it was so traditional that it had been out of date the day it left the factory. For example, this large, heavy car desperately needed power steering but didn’t have it. The result was a steering wheel so big it wouldn’t have been out of place on a bus. And a combination of the weight, it’s distribution and the uncomplicated cardboard tires of the time meant that it was picky about changing direction. The heater never worked (except in warm weather) and when I investigated the reason for the driver's window not winding down I found that the mechanism had been replaced with a collection of ironmongery that jammed the window closed.
The model number meant something, too: 105 was the power of the engine, and R meant Roverdrive, the reason for the rarity (and undesirability). Simply put, the Roverdrive was a botch-up in the grand old English tradition. A kludge. A mess. Borg-Warner was already making acceptable automatic transmissions in 1957, but for the 105R Rover decided that they could do better, or at least different. The Roverdrive was a fluid flywheel (distant, and inferior, cousin to a torque converter) at the engine, coupled to a standard friction clutch, a two-speed gearbox and a standard Laycock overdrive unit. Every part of this uneasy alliance made its presence felt: The fluid flywheel meant that an engine oil change required three gallons (Imperial gallons, equivalent to nearly four US gallons) of oil! The clutch was operated pneumatically by engine vacuum and electricallycontrolled by a button on the shift lever, thereby multiplying the possibilities of failure. The gearbox was normally left in high gear unless you were planning to start on a steep grade (shifting while on the move was a chancy and noisy affair), and the overdrive was intended to automatically engage at 30mph when an ingenious, but unreliable, centrifugal switch operated. Strangely enough, the complicated parts (fluid flywheel, gearbox, clutch, overdrive) worked well, but the pneumatic/electrical connection and the centrifugal switch were a constant annoyance. The engine was flexible enough to handle the fact that this was, in effect, a two-speed system (at best) with one gear below 30mph and another above, and the car’s handling characteristics discouraged you from worrying about performance.
Despite the idiosyncrasies, and the need for frequent stripping-down of the transmission to get at the centrifugal switch, the Rover was a pleasant companion for quite some while, although I thought I was a goner when a fist-sized chunk of a front sidewall blew out. (Actually, a friend thought briefly that he was a goner in the Rover, under somewhat different circumstances). I was happy with the Rover until I drove a Can.