I don't know why I purchased my Rover 25, except that it was cheap and I needed a cheap low mileage car that would get me from A to B. To be honest, it did give me two and a half years of trouble free motoring before things started to go wrong, but it then started to suffer from some quite serious and expensive problems despite having only covered 52000 miles.

I did test drive the car but should probably have spent more time with it before buying.

I found the car to be quite unpleasant to drive, it was (for me) too lightweight on the handling and didn't "stick to the road" very well on corners, the steering was woolly and not very responsive. When there was a slight wind, the car got quite badly buffeted and I found it quite hard to get it to keep its line on the road, which actually scared me on some occasions. I got the shock absorbers checked out but apparently all was working as intended. I have driven many cars and this was the only car where I felt at times in some weather conditions that I was slightly losing control. It may have been my perception but I was not comfortable in the car, and despite many trouble free years of motoring I began to lose my confidence in my driving and look for excuses not to get in the car.

The car was not particularly comfortable to sit in, and the fixtures and fittings inside the car were quite plasticy and cheap looking. I removed the factory fitted cassette player and radio, and installed my own CD player to bring the car into the 21st century.

Fuel performance wise, it was not too bad but certainly no better than most small cars I have driven (with the exception of my 1.9l Peugeot 205GTi) and the road performance of the car was certainly weak, there wasn't a lot of oomph under the bonnet.

When things started to go wrong with the car, they certainly went very wrong, from constant issues with the lights on the dashboard appearing (minor but annoying) via over £1k of garage bills to a final and inevitable problem with the head gasket.

All things considered, from performance to driving experience to value for money and build quality, I will not be considering a Rover again in the future.