DO YOU REMEMBER – THE ROVER 600?
By Andrew Roberts |
21st December, 2020
A highlight of the May 1993 edition of Car magazine was Roger Bell’s evaluation of a 620SLi opposite the BMW 318i, the Citroen Xantia 2.0 and the Ford Mondeo 2.0 GLX. His article was headlined ‘Rover bites back’, and he concluded:
Assemble these four cars for appraisal by an unprejudiced public and the Rover would win hands down. No question. It is a winner. If we’re talking class – and that’s what the upper echelons of the M2 sector are all about – the 620SLi exudes it.
Mr. Bell also thought the Rover scored handsomely ‘for comfort, refinement, quietness and build quality. Above all, it imbues the driver with a sense of it’s good-to-be-here well-being that its rivals cannot match. It has style, it has image, it has class’.
Today, any 600 is a reminder of a lost world, with John Major as the prime minister and Angus Deayton hosting Have I Got News for You, but 27 years ago it was greeted with considerable interest. Rover initiated plans for their successor to the Montego in 1989 but, as Keith Adams and David Morgan point out in www.aronline.co.uk - the new model ‘had to use nothing but Honda petrol power units and the only changes Rover was permitted to make were to the car’s external design’. Nor could it be marketed in the USA.
In other words, the 600 was to be a revised Swindon-built Accord. It made its bow on 19th April 1993 – a car possessing ‘Power Curves In All The Right Places’. Here is priceless footage of a young Jeremy Clarkson (plus his amazing hair) taking a 600 through its paces for Top Gear.
He rather liked it too, although informing viewers the equivalent Honda cost £2,000 less than the – admittedly well-appointed - SLi test car.
However, Longbridge aimed the 600 at the lower-rungs of the Audi/BMW market sector. John Fordham wrote in The Independent that the top of the range 623 was ‘a pretty exclusive suit’ and was, for £21,995, a ‘Superb-looking machine, with flowing body design, subtlety of detail and excellent luxury-class cabin’. He also thought that the Rover was ‘More inviting than a BMW inside’.
The 620 Ti of 1994 further enhanced the image of the line-up. Power was from a 2-litre 16-valve turbocharged twin-cam engine, and the top speed was a highly impressive 143 mph. When Car tested the Ti opposite the Ford Mondeo 2.5 24v Ghia, the Renault laguna V6 and the Saab 900 SE Turbo, they concluded ‘we’d take the Rover’. It must also be said that such lines as ‘in the executive set, there are two routes to paunch and panache’ are extremely Alan Partridge.
It was evident that the 600 was a car of great potential, but corporate politics dictated otherwise. The original Honda agreement limited any radical developments, and after the 1994 BMW takeover of Rover, the new management was unlikely to sanction an in-house-rival to the E36. The 600 was never available in coupe form, and nor was there an estate - indeed, the Montego Countryman continued to be available until 1994.
Production of the 600 ended in 1999, shortly after Rover introduced the replacement 75. It deserves to be remembered as a 1990s classic of ‘character and distinction’ - and who could resist the showroom video?
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