Rover 3500 | Vintage British Car | British Leyland | Drive in | 1976 

I had a 3.5 v8 automatic in 1985. Kept it for 5 years. The engine was so quiet until you hit the throttle. It was a lovely car to drive. Comfortable too.

I see this car and find myself singing "don't you want me baby!!" Ah ah ah!!!

Great styling and engine. Shame about the build quality.

This old Rover SD1 was very unique and a great style for its day..!!! 😁👌 That V8 was a beast...!!! 👍

My V8 Vanden Plas in silver with brown trim was one of my best used cars pound for pound .... solid, fast and luxurious.

A centrally located door lock? It's witchcraft I tells thee.

I had a white Vanden Plas V8 SD1 back in the early 80's. It was a gorgeous car to drive. Smooth and with that awesome V8 roar when you put your foot down. Sadly, the biggest issues were rust on the wheel arches and water ingress via the electric sunroof. If I'd have known as much about cars then as I do now, I'd still have it as a weekend run around.

Had a V8 v reg. ( it was 6 years old when l got it) had it for 8 years. Absolutely loved it. So comfortable, and that engine!

Still a handsome car!

The exterior styling of that car was way ahead of it's time. I would easily think that car was from the mid 80's.

I didn't see the V8 being criticised coming!

Always had a soft spot for the SD1 and the sound of that V8 is orgasmic

I had a used one in the 'mid-80's and it was a lovely drive. Had the looks, but the quality was British, unfortunately, so it was the last Rover I owned. I'd had a few good used Rover 2000s between 1970-85 so I was sad to see Rover going down the BL plughole.

For a Leyland, this was a very nice car indeed with a fabulous engine and beautiful styling. One of BL's better efforts.

Lovely car...I can remember sleeping in the back on long trips across South Africa as a child.

I love this car, beautiful and timeless!

Thank you for posting this. Please continue.

Had 2 when I was young, a 2300SE in 1990, followed by a couple of years later...an ex Police manual 3500 SD1. Always wanted a Vitesse Twin Plenum.

Remarkably good fuel efficiency in the early 20s haha love it! How can that 3500 V8 be "slightly disappointing?!" Wonderful car anyway.

This car looks just as modern as it did back then.

The 3500 was a completely different animal to the other variants which helped redeem it's status today as a true classic despite quality issues. This model had 40bhp less than the later efi that was a police favorite! I find it amusing that their review of the tiny austin allegro vanden plas auto also returned mpg in the low 20's with half the engine, twice the 0-60 time and just 85mph top speed!

When I was hunting for bits on the scrapyards for my Renault 16 back in 1984, some of these cars were already there for terminal rot - as bad as my 16, oddly enough. Pity really; now if a car developed a speck of rust after seven years we'd be up in arms and yet here they were.

Undoubtedly ahead of time especially the design. A front end to be seen in most part of mid and late 80's cars like the Citroen BX and XM and even the 1989 Rover 200/400 series.

It certainly was a car ahead of its time, the style has certainly aged better than most other cars from the era. I did see on another video that apparently one of the top designers at Ford had a model of this car on his desk.

This was a super car with the best V8 engine ever made!

To me the best looking car ever made and to this day a beautiful car oh and the noise that V8 makes!

The Rover 3500 was truly an awe inspiring automobile. Beautiful lines, and V8 engine. Sure, if money were no object, I'd chose the Mercedes-Benz 500SE or even better 500SEC any day; however, I would never ever even consider a Volvo or some French car to even touch Rover 3500's design, prestige, and power.

Rover 3500 is undoubtedly the most beautiful British 4-door car. For a 2-door, the title goes to Lotus Esprit.

To Rovers credit the shape /styling still looks modern-it would blend in today👍

My parents got a pre-production 2300s via a relative that worked for BL. 8 months old. By the time it was 18 months old, It needed a bottom half respray as the silver paint (Also used on the run out P6 VIP model) flaked off. Both glove boxes constantly filled with water. Choke would never stay up (Pull up lever by handbrake) and very difficult to demist windows due to ingress of water under front windscreen. Drank petrol too. Despite all its issues, A very comfortable "Drivers" car with distinctive styling that still looks fresh today.

It was an engineering triumph and a design breakthrough at the time of launch. No bullshit

The vanden Plas & particularly the Vitesse were awesome.

When you think that's 45 years ago now that Rover doesn't look that out of date now, you can only imagine how amazing that would have looked in 1976. Such a shame that build quality and reliability have dogged us even to this day with modern Land Rovers

These cars were beautifull especially the later model 3.5 twin plenum vitesse - pity most were quickly consumed by rust - it's nice to see this video yet sad because rover made great cars , they just weren't built as well as they could of been back then, they upped build quality by the end of the 90s and by the early noughties they finally got it right , then went out of business !

Still a very wonderful looking car.

What a gorgeous car-I wish it had been more of a success.

Door mirrors that can be adjusted from inside the car!!!!!!!!!! Whatever next😆

As a 19 year old back in the 80s I bought a 3500 Rover and it was amazing. It was so powerful and smooth the V8 was the thing that made it. I loved that car and I have such happy memories of it and it was actually quite reliable because it wasn't that old. I traded it in in the end for an RX7 turbo but I still think my 3500 Rover was more of a giggle.

This could be the ultimate 1970s Aston Martin with some badge engineering :-)

As a kid I used to chuckle at Tony's name.

Flawed but the later Vitesse model was a great car to drive

It was a great car for 1976, but by 1977 the things were rusting - badly on panel, bonnet and boot corners. And the bloody things had a nasty habit of leaking to the point you got in one and it smelled of rotting sound proofing. If THIS car had been the first with open Honda input- like quality control, fixing the leaks, and putting the new Honda 2.0i engine in it, it would have been sellable. But by 1978/1979 second hand dealers wouldnt touch them. It was Leylands swansong. With everything that turned away sales included. Truly sad.

I could hear the crackling as mine rusted away right from underneath me in very short order indeed.

My Father had two of these wonderful cars in succession and they never once let us down. It still holds the family record for the Cambridge to Oban overnight cup at just under 7.5 hours. Perhaps not as fast as some might claim but I doubt that others had 2 baths, 2 bogs, 2 pedestal basins, a hot water cylinder and all the pipe work and fittings to plumb an entire house on board! (+1 passenger). We also did a run to the old Yugoslavia and another to Lisbon for family holidays. All acquitted without a hint of an issue and in great comfort. It was considered quite chic curtesy of Ultavox's Vienna video and proved a very accomplished piece of engineering for the standards of its time. The truth is that BL was, by this stage, a near fatally damaged brand. It was constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons and the image of militant groups of turkeys all voting blithely for Christmas was not a concept that people wanted to buy into or be associated with in the main. It was going to die and the only question was how soon. Amazingly there is still one in daily use in the village where I live now and despite its somewhat scabby appearance it still makes me feel nostalgic when I see it.

waay ahead of its time, love em!

Beautiful car

Respect from Hungary,great car. Designer of the structure,Spencer King,fast safe car dreamt on paper. David Bache,the designer broke with conservative lines. This luxury car has reminiscent of Italian and French style bodywork and sporty look.

Still a good looking car :) Oh and don't think all the other cars at the time were superb. Citroen were garbage and you wouldn't be seen dead in a Fiat. Most cars then suffered badly from bad manufacturing. Think BL were cutting edge with design at the time.

Always loved these.

Yes build quality was an issue, but still love it today

Not many of these left now, bit of a rot box if I remember right.

I remember my uncle having one a v8 leather interior I use to love goin in that car as kid

Good looking car and nice V8. Shame about the strikes and sabotage by the workers that ruined it's image.

Beautiful car 44 years on...even in 'hearing aid beige'

I had a look at a 1981 Rover and the quality of it's leather is better than current prestige cars which look like painted vinyl.

love these sdi rovers , my uncle has two of them brand new in his barn :-O

I loved the Princess 6 cyl

Probably the nicest thing anyone ever said about the PRV V6 was that its' displacement was "fashionable".

Brilliant car, never let us down. Didn't have any build issues at all. Only criticism we had was the bumpers were fragile.

I never appreciated the styling of these things; too many ruler-straight lines for a tear-shaped car, the same complaint I had with the Chevrolet Monza and 1978-79 Buick Century. They sold these for a few years in the USA; I had no idea that the 3500 engine was not much different from the "215 V8" in my boss's 1962 F85. It was an interesting car and was never confused with anything else on the road, but build quality and reliability problems caught up with it in a couple of years. I don't remember the last time I saw one. From the headlines, which just said "3500", I'd always assumed that Princes Grace (Kelley) died in one of these, but Wikipedia says it was a 1971 model of the previous generation.

Remarkably good mpg - somewhere in the low 20s!!

I love the design.

My mother had a new one, bright yellow black vinyl roof. She hated it. She sold after 2 months and bought a beautiful jaguar!

The first early report I've seen on the SD1. A very early P reg, wish they'd gone into more detail. I hope to still own one before I kick the bucket.

My uncle was the Maintenance Manager for a Vehicle fleet provider and remembered getting four “S” V8s in 1980 with lots of interior trim missing. So they could provide them for the client they had to get bits of trim from the local BL dealer and rebuild the interiors in the body shop. As his branch of the firm was based at the Company’s Vauxhall franchise this caused quite a stir. I have updated this, I got the model wrong, I originally said Vitesse, believe it was an “S” as the cars in question were the top spec SD1 models of 1980.

My mates Dad would give us a lift to school in one of these back in 1978... I wanted my Dad to buy one too but he wouldn't. Probably a wise choice

Still a beautiful car in 2022.

Brilliant car. I live in the US now but I'd love to ship a nicely sorted one over and tool around the local town in it. Also when he popped the hood complaining. I assumed it would have the 2 litre in it. How could the V8 fail to bring a smile ?

Adjustable door mirrors; mind blown.

I used to do Triumph Stag engine conversions from the Crappy Triumph V8 to the Rover SD1 or Fords 3.0 or 3.1 Litre V6s....I did 16 in total for customers and all successful....I then did a few very old Range Rover conversions from the V8 to fitting a Massey Ferguson 3 cyl Perkins engine with a nice power bulge on the bonnet and again very successful..especially for farmers and crofters who could now run their Range Rovers on Red Agri Diesel.

The 3500 was the first model launched before the 2300 and 2600.

My uncle had a V8, bought it new, drove it for 4 years, had constant break downs, and it's been in standing rotting in the barn since the last breakdown nearly 24 years ago. He had terrible luck with these, he had the Triumph Chicane 2500 before the Rover and that was even worse.

Still looks good today, 40+ years on (if you see one of the few cherished examples that remain). And the V8, although quite thirsty, was still the engine of choice for most Rover fans. Just a shame it was built by BL, that company didn't deserve such a prestigious marque. And along with all the other marques under the BL umbrella, they wrecked the reputation of what once were, proud British brands that had a reputation for quality. I still get emotional when my eyes are graced with such beauty, and lamenting over what Rover should have become. But instead, we ended up with a plethora of pig ugly Austin rust heaps and the god awful princess.

my dad had a very rare(ish) VM2400 turbo diesel in mid/late 80's- it was comfortable yes but was the most unreliable pile of shite going. A couple of gearboxes, several fuel pumps, windows that went down but never up, sunroofs the same. I hated even borrowing it let alone owning it. He gave up with Austin Rover and brought a Sierra Ghia XR4x4 estate which i wish I had brought when he sold it ( but I had a MG Maestro so I definetly didn't learn)

Still looks great !

Very stylish in the 70s

Great car apart from the build qualty, it had a beem axle, but what made it stand out, rather than the cheep and nasty Panhard linkage found in cars such as the early Fords, this used the far superior Watts linkage, so no side to side movement under braking and cornering that you always got with the Panhard linkage. I always wanted the Rover SDI, what a fab car, especialy with that glorious and simple to work on push rod V8!

The 3.5 V8 was a Great car and is still sought after

The 3500 was the first model of the Rover SD1 to be launched in 1976. The 2300/2600 came the following year, that replaced the Rover 2200 P6 and also the Triumph 2000/2500. By 1981 there was a 2 litre SD1 that was the most unreliable, and also a 2400 diesel. Handsome styling possibly like the Citroen CX.

I know the build quality was shit, but these are really great characterful cars. Check out 'The Liver Run'!

We all love these cars now but we all slagged BL off in the day we has the glorious british nation. I was proud to work for Austin Rover best days of my life. I can remember the Rover 800 arriving and again for a short period that car was right up there. I look at what Germany had at the time and everybody talked about reliability and build quality of the BMW. This much I know BMW would never have bought Rover if they didnt need the knowledge !

Remember my dad sitting in one of these at “Motorfair” and part of the dashboard fell apart in his hand!

I owned two of these. The first was utter and complete junk so awful was the build quality but my second, the face-lift Mark II was infact a very good car and served me well.

Don't knock the Buick/Rover V8! A great engine!

This is from 1976 and the car still looks current.

It was a beauty. My dad had company cars back then and he could have had the 2600. I never understood why he preferred a Granada to this but now I can see why. The Granada didn't break down. The thing not mentioned that was always a bugbear of reviewers was the crudeness of the rear suspension, a live rear axle, compared to the competition with proper independent suspension of the rear wheels. One wonders what the 95 million was spent on.

Holy crap that looks like a 1990 in the usa

What is this locale that they use so often? Very picturesque.

Beautiful thing still hasn’t dated crazy thing it was a great circuit Car handles like a dirty great go kart lovely to drive in V8 form

Low 20s mpg? Bollocks! I had one and it had more of a drink problem than big George Best......the GM 180 auto gearbox gave up the ghost before the car was even ten years old. Cars just didn't live as long as they do now...

I had one of the last 86 model 3500 Vanden Plas SD1's in the 90's - I think by then Rover had kind of sorted themselves out because it was a great motor and clocked 200,000 miles during my ownership. Unfortunately if threw its gearbox at 205,000 and went to the scrapper.

I shake my head incredulously that the BL conglomerate / morass undermined the success of such a brilliant car. David Bache contributed such magnificent forward-looking designs that represented modern Britain and not "ye olde England". This car is still a stunner, and I have only seen one once here on this continent....I was visiting Toronto in 1982, and there was a yellow one sitting in rush hour "traffic" (gridlock). I'll never forget it. To me, Rover would have gone from strength to strength had it gotten out of the gate and into the road. The cars to follow were nice, but became less distinctive, and finally just retro (albeit, attractive).

Well ahead of its time - with a rear rigid axis...

They still look good

Still a beautiful looking car today

Cool :) shape remind's me of a 1982 Chevy Citation

The Rover SD1 was launched in 1976 with the 3500 and was more reliable than the 2300 and 2600 that came a year later in 1977. There were even a low spec 2000 and a 2400 diesel by 1982. It was one of few big hatchbacks at the time, another was the Citroen CX. It would be 1985 when Ford launched the Mk3 Granada that initially a hatchback. There were prototype SD1s as a saloon but didn't seem to look right. In reality the SD1 was a big Austin Allegro or Maxi.

I always thought that the SD1 was a good looking car but I don’t remember the ride height being as high as on this example, perhaps they were still fine tuning the suspension….

Given the fact that the British call this permanently damp island their home, one of the things you would expect from a British car is that it would be resistent to rust.

I personally love these cars. I had a 2300S manual (D reg - D179 MOK - I think it was dead a good while ago) I loved it and it never let me down. Got it at 2 years old. I remember doing Blackpool to South Manchester very late night in 30 mins before the 'invention' of speed cameras! Only downside was the parts cost. Probably around early 90s I distinctly remember a stainless steel exhaust costing around £270 which came as a shock (dealers fault)