“Imported cars” are vehicles sold in a country other than where they were originally built, often requiring compliance changes for local regulations. The hosts frame this as a cause of ugly exterior modifications—especially lighting and bumper differences—when cars cross the Atlantic.
This refers to the common practice of modifying a car’s exterior lighting and bumper components to meet U.S. regulations and then carrying those parts (or their look) into other markets. In the episode’s context, the hosts argue these changes often produced awkward “hybrid” front/rear styling.
The Chevrolet Impala is a large sedan made by Chevrolet. The podcast mentions the 1996 model because it had taillights that looked different from what some people expected. They’re discussing that specific styling detail.
The Chevrolet Corvette is a sports car made by Chevrolet. It’s known for being fast and for having a strong performance reputation. The podcast mentions some Corvettes because certain versions have notable differences.
The SD1 is a car model made by Rover. The podcast pauses to clarify what it is, which suggests it’s an important reference in their discussion. They’re using it as a comparison point for something they’re talking about.
The 3500S is a Rover car model. The podcast mentions it as something noteworthy, likely because it fits the theme of the cars they’re discussing. It’s brought up as a specific example from Rover’s lineup.
The Rover SD1 is an older British car that people still talk about today, especially because it’s a V8-era classic. Here, the speaker is talking about what happened to their SD1 after it came back from being worked on.
That phrase means the car’s gearbox failed in a big, sudden way. Instead of slowly wearing out, something inside broke badly enough that the transmission couldn’t function.
A scatter shield is a safety plate that’s meant to catch flying debris if a major mechanical part breaks. People add them when they’re running more power or doing swaps, because failures can be more violent.
Horsepower is how much power the engine can make. Here, they’re saying the engine is claimed to be around 250 horsepower, but they haven’t checked it with a real measurement yet.
“Euro” here means the car has lighting and bumpers made to match European rules, which can be different from US versions. The speaker is pointing out those parts as a clue to what the car currently has.
Hagerty is an insurance company that focuses on classic cars. The host is mentioning their “guaranteed insurance” option as something you can look up through the link.
Replacement cost is what you’d need to spend to get a similar car again. For rare cars, that can be way more than what the car is worth to buy or sell.
Rust is corrosion on the car’s metal. For older cars, rust can be a big deal because it can be expensive to fix and can affect safety and value.
Topic
insurance payout vs repair costs
They talk about how insurance money and repair estimates determine whether a car is written off. They also explain why parts and shipping can make repairs expensive.
“Not totaled” means the insurer decided the car’s damage wasn’t severe enough to declare it a total loss. That decision is usually based on whether the repair cost stays below a specific threshold compared with the car’s value.
The “threshold” is the insurance company’s rule for deciding when a car is too expensive to fix. If the repair estimate is under that line, they’ll usually repair it.
The “lower grill” is the front opening near the bottom of the bumper area. Here they mention it’s welded on, meaning it’s not as easy to remove and replace as a bolt-on part.
Johann is a person the host mentions who helped by sending the bumpers. The point here is that he had them and made them available for the host to compare how the car would look in Europe.
Lower tow hooks are the metal points on a car where you can attach a tow strap. They’re usually near the bumper, and whether they’re there (or covered) affects the car’s look and how you’d tow it.
“Full suspension” means more than one suspension part was updated or replaced. That can completely change how the car rides and handles, especially when paired with new tires.
Tires are what actually touch the road. Switching to different tires can change how the car grips, turns, and rides—so it can feel like a totally different car.
Term
Pumo Solis
This sounds like the name of the tires that were on the car before. Changing to a different tire model can noticeably change how the car drives.
Term
Fred a Science Sprint Classic
This sounds like the name of the specific tire brand/model now installed. Different tires grip differently and can make the car feel much better or worse.
High compression means the engine squeezes the fuel-air mixture more tightly than usual. It can help the engine make more power, but it usually needs the right fuel to avoid knocking.
“Head work” refers to modifications to the cylinder head (like porting/valve work) to improve airflow, while “cams” are the camshafts that control valve timing and lift. Together, they’re common performance upgrades that change how the engine breathes and where it makes power.
A pushrod engine is an engine design where the camshaft pushes on rods to open the valves. It’s a common older-style layout that many enthusiasts associate with classic performance engines.
Two valves per cylinder means there’s one valve for letting air/fuel in and one for letting exhaust out. More valves can sometimes flow more air, but two-valve engines can still be strong when designed well.
A carburetor is a device that mixes fuel and air before it goes into the engine. It’s common on older cars and can be tuned to help the engine make more power.
Headers are upgraded exhaust parts that help gases leave the engine more easily. That can improve power, especially when the rest of the engine is set up for performance.
The Range Rover is a large SUV made by Land Rover. It’s designed to handle rough roads but still feel comfortable. The podcast brings it up because some parts or designs are meant for it and may not fit other cars correctly.
“Butt dyno” means guessing how much power you gained just by how it feels to you, not by measuring it. It’s a humorous way to say the results are hard to verify.
Torque is the engine’s twisting force. More torque usually means the car feels stronger when you accelerate, especially before you reach the highest RPM.
Term
engine used to start to fall on its face
They mean the engine stops pulling strongly at higher revs. It feels like it runs out of steam or doesn’t respond as well.
“Cam chop” is the choppy, uneven sound some performance engines make at idle. It usually comes from a camshaft that’s designed for power at higher RPM.
“Smog legal” means the car is allowed under emissions rules and should be able to pass an emissions test. It usually implies the exhaust and emissions parts are still in place.
A manual transmission is the kind of car gearbox where you shift gears yourself. It still needs oil inside to keep the gears from wearing out or grinding.
The “pump” is a part inside the transmission that moves oil to the gears. If it doesn’t spin or engage correctly, the fifth gear area can run dry, overheat, and the transmission can fail hard.
“Locked in fifth gear” means the car gets stuck in one gear and won’t shift normally. That usually happens when something inside the gearbox fails or doesn’t get oil properly.
When someone says a transmission “grenaded,” they mean it broke in a big, sudden way. In this story, it’s tied to the transmission not getting proper lubrication, so it locks up and fails.
Term
shakedown on the transmission
A shakedown is a quick test drive after work is done. The goal is to make sure the new transmission is acting right before you drive it normally.
That light means the engine isn’t getting enough oil pressure. Since oil is what keeps moving parts from grinding, you should treat it as a serious warning and stop driving until it’s checked.
An external oil pressure gauge is a tool you connect to the engine to directly measure oil pressure. It helps confirm whether the warning light is telling the truth or if the sensor/switch is the problem.
Term
oil pressure center
This is the spot on the engine where you can measure oil pressure—either with a sensor or by attaching a gauge. If you can’t connect correctly, you can’t trust the reading.
A taper thread is a special screw shape where the threads get tighter as you tighten them. The right thread is important so the fitting seals correctly and doesn’t leak oil or give bad readings.
An oil pressure problem means the engine isn’t pumping oil well enough. It’s a big deal if it happens when the oil is hot, because hot oil can flow more easily and pressure can drop.
A full throttle pull means you floor it and accelerate hard. It heats things up, and afterward the oil pressure can drop when the engine goes back to idling.
A pressure relief valve is like a safety valve for the oil system. If oil pressure gets too high, it opens to keep the engine from being stressed by excessive pressure.
The front timing cover is a protective housing at the front of the engine. Here, it also includes the oil pump housing, which makes repairs more involved than swapping a simple pump part.
Two pressure relief valves means the oil system uses more than one “pressure limit.” One helps at idle, and the other prevents pressure from going too high under load.
This is how much pressure the engine’s oil system makes when the engine is just idling. If that pressure is too low, the engine may not be getting enough lubrication.
They’re using petroleum jelly as a temporary helper to get the oil pump working. The idea is it helps the pump seal so it can start pulling oil through.
“Scored” means the metal surfaces are scratched up with grooves. That kind of damage can stop parts from sealing properly and can lead to oil pressure problems.
Burrs are little rough metal nubs or sharp edges. If they’re inside an oil pump, they can mess up how parts fit together and can contribute to extra wear.
“Small block” usually refers to a classic V8 engine family (often Chevy). Here it’s being used as a dramatic comparison to say the pump looks like it got wrecked by something big.
The oil pan is the part at the bottom that stores the engine oil. If you’re taking the front cover off, the oil pan may need to come off too to access everything safely.
Term
metal in it
Finding metal bits in the oil usually means something inside the engine is wearing down. It’s a warning sign that the problem may be more than just a minor issue.
Lifters are parts inside the engine that help open and close the valves. If the engine had low oil pressure, the lifters may not be getting enough lubrication and can start making noise or acting up.
Hydraulic lifters use oil pressure to keep the valve train adjusted automatically. If oil pressure is low, they can start making noise and may not work right until the oiling issue is fixed.
The oil filter catches dirt and metal bits from the oil. If metal is coming out of the oil filter, it usually means something inside the engine is wearing badly and sending debris through the system.
It means you drive the car briefly right after work is done to make sure everything is working and nothing is broken. The goal is to find issues early, before they turn into bigger problems.
A vacuum leak is when air gets into the engine where it shouldn’t. That can make the engine run poorly because the computer can’t measure the air correctly.
A “time warp” car is one that’s basically stayed in its original, unmodified state. The idea is that if you don’t mess with a complicated car, you’re less likely to create new problems.
This is a BMW M5 from the E34 generation. It’s a complicated performance car, and the point here is that messing with it can make things go wrong more easily than leaving it alone.
The steering box is the part that turns your steering wheel into the motion that actually steers the car. On some cars, that part can wear out over time, making steering feel loose or off.
Opportunity cost means the “cost of what you could have done instead.” In this case, buying the nicer car costs more money up front, but it can save you time and trouble that you’d otherwise spend fixing the cheaper one.
The Porsche 911 is a famous sports car from Porsche. Here, they’re talking about buying one that doesn’t run and keeping it stored, like something you own for later.
Concept
put it away as a sort of asset
They’re describing the idea of buying a broken car and keeping it stored for later. Instead of using it right away, you treat it like something you’ll fix or keep because it may be worth something.
“16 valve” tells you how many valves the engine has. More valves can help the engine breathe better, and here it’s just how they’re describing which Volkswagen engines they worked on.
The Volkswagen Scirocco is a sporty Volkswagen model. In this part, they’re talking about how many different engine parts—especially the cylinder head—have been replaced or rebuilt over time.
The cylinder head is a key part of the engine that sits on top of the cylinders. It contains the valve area, so changing cylinder heads usually means serious engine work.
Re-ringed means the piston rings were replaced. Piston rings help seal the combustion gases and control oil—so replacing them is often part of fixing oil-burning or low-compression problems.
The alternator is the part that keeps your car’s battery charged and powers the electronics while the engine is on. If it breaks, the battery runs out and the car can stop running.
The differential ring gear is part of the drivetrain that helps send power to the wheels. If something comes loose in that gear area, the transmission/differential can fail very suddenly and badly.
An ignition coil makes the high-voltage electricity that creates the spark to start and run the engine. If it’s bad, the engine may misfire or not start at all.
A distributor is an older ignition component that sends the spark to the right spark plug at the right moment. Newer cars often don’t use a traditional distributor anymore.
“Master” here sounds like a description of a top-level technician rather than a car model. The podcast is saying the car was serviced by a highly skilled mechanic in Germany. The point is that good maintenance can help a car stay in better shape.
Car
Buick 215
The Buick 215 is a V8 engine from Buick. People look for it because it’s a smaller, lighter V8 that can be rebuilt and upgraded for a fun project.
When an engine “seizes,” the moving parts inside stop moving and the engine gets stuck. It’s a serious failure that can cause a lot of expensive damage.
“Teething stuff” refers to early-production or early-ownership problems that show up after a new design, rebuild, or repair. The idea is that once those initial bugs are worked through, the system becomes stable and dependable.
A “shake down” is a period where you test the car right after work is done to make sure everything is actually fixed. It helps catch early issues before they turn into bigger problems.
The transmission is what transfers power from the engine to the wheels. If it “explodes,” it usually means it failed badly and the car can’t drive normally anymore—often requiring a replacement or major repair.
The radiator is what helps your car cool down by moving hot coolant through a heat exchanger. If it “explodes,” the cooling system has a serious failure and the engine can overheat quickly.
The emergency/parking brake is what keeps a car from rolling when it’s stopped. If it isn’t available, it’s much harder to keep the car safe while you wait for help.
LIVE
Hi.
Hello.
How are you?
I am well.
Thank you.
How are you?
Happy Car Mudgeonation Day.
I am well to you too.
Welcome to the Car Mudgeon Show.
Your name is?
Derek Tam-Scott.
You are?
Jason Space Camisa.
This is the Car Mudgeon Show, which is driven by Haggerty.
Yes, insurance for collectors by collectors.
And I will do a little bit of a Haggerty plug in this episode, but I really mean it.
It's not like a paid like advertising thing, because we have something in the background
that genuinely would not be here if it were insured with convention.
I shouldn't.
Maybe I'm in violation of insurance regulations by saying that, but luckily I don't work
for an insurance company.
I work for a media company that happens to be part of an insurance company, but I would
say there's a good chance this car behind us would not be sitting here right now if
I had conventional insurance on it.
So let's celebrate old cars and good insurance.
Okay.
Via a discussion about the Rover and the latest chapter in its illustrious saga.
And also we will do a discussion of European cars and non-European cars, imported cars
that were ruined or altered by the addition of US lights and bumpers and what some of
the most egregious offensive examples are.
There's probably some wonderful example that's really illustrative that we left out, but
we tried to have a detail.
The person who's like, you know, you should really talk about the 96 Chevy Impala's European
taillights and how terrible they are.
Yeah.
Because some of the Corvettes, for example, with the Ambrose, we could, we can do cars
that were ruined on their way into Europe as a next episode.
Maybe next week.
You just never see American cars in Europe.
For good reason.
Oh, sorry.
Okay.
Well, that's what lies ahead in this episode of the Car Might and Show.
I will now attempt to make a clap and then you will get a little song.
Bravo.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Mary'sville, Ohio is the answer to that question.
Damn it.
Sorry.
Remember what Mary, Mary'sville, Ohio would ever be the answer to any question.
Any question.
So that's apparently the start of the episode, which is going to start on your Mary'sville,
Ohio.
Okay.
What does that have to do with anything?
Okay.
Obviously.
Never mind.
Nothing.
What, what did you point out?
The Rover is here.
Which Rover?
What is it?
It is a Rover SD1.
Oh, you missed the airplane.
Rover 3500.
Reverence.
What?
The Rover, what is it?
Well, it's a British car, but that's not important right now.
Oh, that's been defunct since 2005 due to gross mismanagement at British Leyland.
One could argue it was defunct long before that.
Yes.
You're right.
It was sort of, well, British Leyland was the route to death of it.
Yes.
My Rover SD1 is after 15 months back.
I think we talked about in the podcast, it returned.
I made it, was it 19 kilometers?
I think it was 19 kilometers and the transmission imploded.
God damn it.
Fuck.
Grenaded.
Munched itself, munched itself, whatever.
Well, at least it didn't explode since you don't have a scatter shield installed.
That's true.
Due to the massive power output of your new engine might need a scatter shield.
We don't know if the engine has massive output.
It was, it is quoted and claimed at 250 horsepower, but I haven't yet to measure it.
So the car is here.
It may not be here for long.
Oh, no.
But okay, first things first, look at it.
Anything look different?
Yeah.
It has Euro lights and Euro bumpers and it has been uncrashed.
It has been uncrashed.
I will say just having nothing to do with the fact that I have a JasonSentMe.com t-shirt on,
which will bring you to a place where you can get a quote for Hagerty's guaranteed insurance.
This car wouldn't be here right now if I didn't have Hagerty.
Where would it be?
Probably in a junkyard somewhere.
Or would have been sitting under a tarp while I collected the funds necessary to,
or sort of prepared myself.
Look, I've said this before on the podcast.
I say this to people all the time.
There's a very big difference between market value and replacement cost.
I had this car insured for replacement cost,
which is far greater than the market,
certainly the market value that we spent buying it.
How did you value the time spent transiting back?
From what?
Well, you have to put that into replacement cost.
How much does a road trip from Edmonton, Canada cost?
I don't think you could buy another one of these cars in Edmonton, Alberta.
So basically what I did was I priced the car.
I have the car insured for an amount consistent with what it would cost me to go and find a suitable replacement.
And because I will never be able to find a real replacement for this car, right?
I'll never find another North American, never.
It's unlikely I will find another North American specification SD1 without rust, low mileage, complete, fully functioning.
What I did instead was look at what it would cost for me to buy a Euro market or the British market car in really nice shape,
preferably a Vitesse, because I feel like that's comparable and rarity to a North American car.
And so I insured it for now.
I haven't insured for quite a lot of money.
But then I think, what did we pay for this car, 6,000 Canadian or something?
7,000, I don't know, 6 or 7,000.
So 45 cents US.
I think upon the crash, when I crashed it, I had it insured for 20,000 US,
which would have at the time bought a nice European spec car without rust that had gone through and fully functioning and would have paid to get it home.
Really glad I did because the actual bodywork wound up being $14,000 to repair.
A lot of that is a parts are expensive.
The fender was like 150 pounds in the UK.
Shipping it to the US was many hundreds more.
The hood we wound up salvaging because even though I could get a used hood, it's a British hood,
which meant it was rusted and shitty and it would have been thousands of dollars to refinish it.
After spending, I think the shipping estimate was 2,500 US to get a hood from the UK.
So instead we use the money to...
So the parts aren't expensive. The shipping is expensive.
Parts aren't always cheap.
But yeah, in the case of this car, so what I did was I took the insurance, the payout from Hagerty.
The car was not totaled, obviously.
It was below the threshold.
Total repair cost was below the threshold.
And I threw in all of the things that I wanted to upgrade.
So these are now Series 1 European headlights, which required some trim and some other stuff.
But also that lower, the lower grill on these cars and the fenders, by the way, are welded on.
And so I paid out of my own pocket to have the car upgraded.
That's sort of one of my own personal policies is if you're mixing paint and you wrong your car,
I think it's time to give it a little bit of a cookie.
And I thought, okay, let's put this to the way it would look from Europe.
There was a guy, I think I mentioned on the podcast in the past, a guy in Sweden named Johann,
who sent me the bumpers. He had them lying around.
And so now this is the correct look, possibly without those lower tow hooks.
I haven't quite looked into that yet.
But this is the way the car would have looked if it were delivered in Europe.
And I am thrilled with how it looks.
You don't seem all that impressed.
It's a dramatic improvement for sure.
Okay, good. I mean, you're saying it went from a zero to one.
No, no, I feel like there's another shoe that's about to drop.
And I was readying myself for the true dropage.
Well, you drove it.
I drove it.
It is unrecognizable from a driving experience compared to how it was before,
after you did these full suspension and tires.
Because remember, it didn't have, what were those?
Pumo Solis.
Solis Cumhorse.
Yes.
On it.
Now it has Freda Science Sprint Classic.
And the combination of the suspension and the tires completely.
I said, I think on the podcast.
I think you did.
It was unrecognizable from a driving experience.
It's dramatically improved.
It really feels a lot nicer.
Funny.
When you have suspension that suspends in tires that are tired.
Or tiring.
Or tiring.
And yeah, but it also now has high compression,
head work cams.
This was all done at a shop.
Cam.
Cam.
Sorry.
This is a tough transition for you.
Never you're having owned a Cam and Block car.
It's the only pushrod engine I've ever owned.
I think.
Yes.
I think that's probably true of me too.
Technically you did own part of this car.
Yeah.
Fuel injected, two valve per cylinder, but pushrods.
Yeah.
Nothing else?
I'm just searching the database.
You hear the hard drive?
He's got an old spinny hard drive.
It's actually the programmed with cards.
It's card sorting.
Yeah.
Sorting of punch cards.
Yeah.
So this is TWS motors.
They're in Taunton mass, which is sort of in between Boston and Providence.
This is their high, high compression, high performance,
rated 260 horsepower engine.
With this injection?
No.
No.
That's with carbs or with a carburetor and their headers on it.
Their headers don't unfortunately fit in the SD1.
They're designed for Range Rover or Triumph TRA or something?
I think CR8.
And so these are headers from D&D in Michigan,
which are pretty small, but they're sort of block huggers.
So they're not enormous.
TWS was hoping for 210 horsepower expecting 200 plus.
Not sure we're there.
Your butt dyno is unsure.
It's tough to tell because I don't, if I had to guess,
and now I'm setting myself a failure because butt dyno is
unnotoriously inaccurate.
I don't actually think it makes much torque more than it did before,
if any, but whereas the engine used to start to fall on its face by 4,000
and it was just done by five grand, this pulls right to 6,500.
Yes.
The motor's character is totally transformed.
So, I mean, between the chassis and the tires and now the motor,
it feels like a different car.
I feel that just, it feels like the fully realized version of the car
that it was before.
It's not unrecognizable, but everything about it that was like the
major deficiencies are now sort of at a place where it's like,
this is very satisfactory.
It needs more cam chop.
It needs, it needs cutouts.
I need to be able to start the thing and have it go,
but it does now have a bit of a lopid idle.
It sounds a little bit, it's funny because it's the exact same exhaust.
It has cats on it.
By the way, it's fully smog legal.
It's still running the original fuel injection,
but it definitely sounds angrier than it did.
And it pulls and pulls.
I'm, I wish it pulled harder rather than just longer,
but also it had been 15 months since I drove the car.
And so maybe, I mean, it's been at least that since you drove it.
Do you think it pulls harder?
Do you think it feels a lot faster?
It's like, if you have to think about like the duration of your acceleration,
it's just that you're pulling the gear longer.
And so it, I, like my brain says that it's definitely faster
because the way that it pulls for so much longer before you get a shift,
like it has to be faster.
But the like perceived experience that you have in gear,
like if you were, especially if you were to shift at the same point
that you did with the old engine, it doesn't feel terribly different.
Yeah.
I think if you put this car now and this car before,
lined them up at 2500 RPM in the same gear at the same time
and floored them, they would be identical.
Yes.
Except for then the other one in the old car,
you'd shift at 5000 RPM sooner or something like that.
Yeah.
Interesting.
That's always an interesting thing, right?
You don't feel horsepower.
You only feel torque.
But yeah, no, it started up, so it blew up.
The TWS guys, the transmission blew up,
TWS guys within a day boxed up a new transmission and sent it to me.
They had one sitting on the shelf, which was awesome.
Well, they hadn't, did they do anything to the transmission?
No, they didn't.
So when it was a part before, when the engine was apart,
David, my colleague, my former colleague at the Haggerty
had pulled the transmission apart to replace a pump.
It is a pump in it, which is something I've never seen from a manual transmission.
And the fact that it locked itself in fifth gear
and the pump is there primarily to lubricate that fifth gear shaft
and the fifth gear set tells me that the most likely explanation
for the transmission granating is that when he put it back together,
the pump didn't engage.
And now Woody, who's the old guy, sort of old man who runs,
old man, that's mean to him, but there's Woody and then his son.
So it's the old man and the young guy, right?
But Woody has been working on these engines and transmissions
for 36 years at the wedge shop.
Said, yeah, everyone who puts one of these pumps in for the first time,
fucks it up because you have to get this one.
The drive shaft for the pump is like a little square piece of like a tubing, basically.
It has to sit perfectly in the pump or it just gets crushed
when you put the case on the transmission back together.
Pump doesn't run and you explode, which is what happened.
So we think that's what happened, but they had this transmission
sitting on the shelf.
It was amazing.
So within a week of Kaboom, it was 10 days.
Kaboom to new transmission in and running 10 days, which is pretty amazing.
But I needed that because I can't have this car is too big in my warehouse
to sit and not be mobile because it blocks all the other cars.
And so, yeah, it was six hour job, put the transmission in.
It's all easy to do.
The gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah.
And then so I was so excited.
Like finally I get to drive the car.
Like, oh my God, after all this time and I ripped around in it
and they, you know, they made it clear, like just go drive it,
like drive it like you normally drive it.
Don't worry about breaking, you know, we're past that.
Just go drive it like you will normally drive it.
I'm like, I'm going to beat it up.
Is that okay?
Yes.
So I took it out for a bit of a drive, probably four miles just to do a
shakedown on the transmission, got it all nice and hot.
And when I came back in and I saw an oil pressure light.
Oh, you've never seen one of those with this car before?
No, I never did.
Well, I did.
On the dyno?
No, no, I only ever saw it.
You weren't in the dyno.
I was in the dyno.
I was in the shop when we saw the oil light for the first time.
When the first engine lost oil pressure the first time.
The second it was on the dyno.
Technically it wasn't running on the dyno.
Now this one again.
And so I call the guy, I sent them videos.
I'm like, Hey guys, we're good.
So we thought it was a bad switch.
It's a very, it's a pain in the ass to get an oil external oil pressure gauge on
this because I don't have any American style tools.
And that's a taper thread on the, on the, for the oil pressure center.
Either way, looks like it was getting no oil pressure when the oil is really hot.
It's fine until it was really hot.
That's kind of a standard set of circumstances under which you would
lose oil pressure.
However, which does a concern.
Does me a concern.
I am concerned that it expresses oil pressure problems when hot,
because that's usually when you would have experienced an oil pressure problem,
which suggests that it's not just.
Let me be clear about this.
This is oil pressure at idle.
The second was at 1200 RPM.
It had, you know, 15 pounds.
It was completely.
Hot idle is the lowest oil pressure you will ever see in an engine.
And so we sort of went back and forth.
If I drove it normally, if I, if I never got on it and just drove it very gently,
I could make it 15 miles and never 20 miles, never saw an oil light.
But all it would take is one full throttle pull,
which would get the oil hot enough to then when it returned to idle,
I'd get a light under 1000 RPM or so.
And so the, the TWS guys were like, oh shit, no problem at all.
We'll just send you a new pressure relief valve.
So the way that the oil pump on this car is the stupidest design I've ever seen.
The pump housing is actually part of the front timing cover and not replaceable
and not rebuildable.
It's part of that.
And so you have two gears that ride in there,
one that's driven by the distributor shaft and the other one that's just a leg gear on inside of it.
And so the pressure is built in between the gears and then as it rounds around that housing.
And then there's a cap, a cover that goes on those gears that has two pressure release valves in it.
One, I think is the sort of minimum at idle.
And one is at 33 pounds for, you know, never once more than 33 PSI of oil pressure.
And sometimes they bind and sometimes they stick.
And so they're like, okay, we'll just send you another one and we can preset them a little bit
to give you, give you a little bit more oil pressure at idle.
Great.
Two days later, it shows up again, an easy job.
The only weird thing I've ever, I've never seen on any engine ever is you cannot start this car
without priming the oil pump.
And the only way to prime the oil pump is to go to the fucking pharmacy and buy a tub of Vaseline.
You have to pack the pump full, completely solid with Vaseline.
And that, and this is in both of the shop manuals that I had the cars,
what the wedge shop guys told me, and I was like, what?
And then it's right in there, packet solid worth of, with petroleum jelly,
which obviously then helps it make a seal to suck some oil in and starts the pumping process.
Bizarro.
But when I had everything out, I saw that this, this oil pump housing is right fucked.
I mean, it's just completely scored and gored and there are burrs everywhere.
It looks like absolute dog shit.
So I sent a picture of them.
I'm like, guys, I'm really concerned about this.
The gears have sort of all kinds of markings on them.
It frankly looks like it sucked in a small block.
Like it just ingested a small block through this oil pressure, this oil pump.
And they're like, they all look like this.
And I was like, this can't be.
And of course, when you look online, you see they all kind of are scored.
It's a shit design.
But anyway, so we put, I put the new thing on, drove it the first time, everything's hunk of door.
I drove the second time, did one pole to 6,000 right before I got, pulled into my driveway.
Cause I love, my neighbors love me.
And soon as I turned the wheel, idle drop from 850 to 825 oil pressure light.
So looked yesterday, I pulled the filter out, looked at it.
It's kind of a glitter bomb in there.
So something is, it could be just the pump gears, some things up,
but there are a bunch of little teething problems with this whole build.
Well, this oil pump design is not normally used for high performance situations.
Like they have some kind of retrofit to.
What I've seen for other, what I've seen online is people just bypass this
and put a either belt or other crank driven or cam driven external oil pump in these engines when they're really going crazy.
And I think it's because you can't rebuild that front timing cover.
First of all, to get that off, you're talking about all pulleys, all belts, all accessories, oil pan, water pump, everything's got to come out of the way.
And so I was talking with the TWS guys, like, what do we do?
Like if the housing's fucked and they're like, they're all fucked.
Like every, there is no great one.
And I have to defer, they've been doing this for 36 years.
Had I seen this pump housing in any other engine, I would have rebuilt the engine.
Like there's just no way where I would have replaced the pump.
But now I'm concerned that there's so much metal in it.
And they're like, no, it's kind of, you know, it's new engine, whatever.
But there are a couple of other little issues that have popped up since.
So I think I have 180 miles on the car now on this engine since I got it here.
And it starts and runs perfectly.
No smoke.
It makes good power like we talked about, whatever.
But there's like a whistle in the intake that I can't find.
One of the lifters is unhappy ever since it had low oil pressure the first time and it just won't come back.
You know, it's mostly quiet, but I hear it all the time.
Is it hydraulic?
They're hydraulic, yeah.
So I think the right thing to do is just send it over, send it back to the TWS because they've...
Well, good thing they're just across the street.
Yeah, there's only 3,000 miles away.
I mean, look, what's happening is we're going back and forth in this volley and emails
and they're doing everything to try to be helpful and I'm doing everything to try to help, right?
Like, all right, I'll do this, but I can't do a timing cover.
I don't have that kind of time.
I'm too busy working on all my other broken shit.
Plus inside baseball, it's the busy time of the year for me filming wise.
I don't have time to do any of this.
And frankly, I want them to go through it.
They're the experts and make sure that kind of everything is fine.
With as much metal as I saw in the coming...
Not in the oil, coming out of the oil filter, clearly it's getting chewed up somewhere
and I want them to be the ones to find it and then go through
and then drive the shit out of the car before they send it back.
And they didn't.
So they'd only put 10 kilometers, so 6 miles on the car after putting the engine in
and they sort of initially were like, we'll probably put 50 or 60 miles on the car
and I said, yeah, no problem, go shake it down, right?
It's a huge job.
You're putting in a brand new engine that's a brand new ground-up build.
Go find it, right?
The reality is, this is a frustration on my side that's not really their fault.
Had they done 50 miles on the test drive, the transmission would have exploded, right?
And it's not that I would have held them to say, all right, it's your fault, give me new tranny
because we knew probably what happened, something went wrong the last time,
but at least they would have been able to swap the transmission in on their shop, on their time,
you know, with, I'm sorry, not on their time, but our expense,
but with their tools and all of their expertise,
and I wouldn't have had to do it more importantly.
And same thing with all of the little sort of niggles that we have.
This is a vacuum leak that I just can't find in the intake,
but I want them to do it.
And one of the guys who works there was like, listen, we don't want to drive this car.
We don't, like, it's gorgeous.
He didn't say that.
The condition is such that it's kind of unrepeatable.
And they know, like, they don't want anything to happen to it.
I understand that completely.
I don't want to drive anyone else's car either because something happens, it's a problem.
But this time, I'm going to be like, it's going to go back with a note saying, drive the shit out of it.
I don't want to see this car again until the odometer reads XXX, right?
It's not that. Just go shake it down, beat the shit out of it, right?
Drive it to his point and beat the shit out of it.
That implies abuse. Drive it to their point exactly the way that I'm going to drive it.
You know, all it's going to take is 50 or 60 miles and all of this, you know, will all will be revealed, right?
After, you know, 100 or 200 or 3 or 1000 miles.
Okay, other things might happen.
But the sort of initial thing, you'll get it shaken down in 50 miles,
especially if, you know, 10 of it is driving it hard and 20 of it is on the highway.
So, most likely, it's going to go visit, go back and visit TWS again.
The gift that keeps on giving.
It is.
So I, the intercooler is an online magazine, car magazine,
and they've, their editor-in-chief has been asking me to write a monthly column and I just can't.
I don't have time. I want to, but I can't.
And so he was like, he finally like a month ago, two months ago, was like, Jason, just do it here.
Write me one column and would you fucking explain why you have an SD1?
Because we're all over here in the UK wondering what you're doing with this car.
So I write, the target was 1500 words and I wrote like 1250 or something, 121300.
It was really difficult to combine the whole road trip and all the, the whole experience with the car,
plus the whole, my emotional connection to this car from having everyone in high school.
And so he was like, send it to me.
I'm like, well, the transmission exploded.
So like, you're going to have to wait.
And he's like, no, send it now.
Everyone loves a good cliffhanger.
He's a smart man because I'm like there, cliffhanger implies there's going to be a follow-up.
I'm doing one column for you. That's it.
And he was like, oh, just send it.
I said, you know what, I'll give you five columns.
Each one has a cliffhanger.
If I thought about it, the first one was my emotional connection.
Oh my God, I mentioned on the podcast, we want one.
A listener says there's one locally.
Oh, shit, we bought it site on scene, cliffhanger.
Column two, we went to Canada to drive this thing home.
Oh my God, is it going to make it?
Oh, fuck, we made it.
Now what are we going to do with the car?
I mean, you live this.
So there's no surprise to you.
Number three column is, well, living with it for a year.
Oh my God, it was amazing.
Nothing broke.
It's been reliable.
It's wonderful.
Oh, shit.
I crashed it into a pickup truck on the way to see Jay Leno cliffhanger.
Is it totaled?
Number four is David's going to do this amazing rebuild.
Like four for us is going to make all this power targets 250 horsepower.
Actual is zero.
Uh-oh.
What happens now because that team was disbanded and David was laid off cliffhanger.
What happens to the car?
So we have four columns complete.
And now, now here we are in column five.
The car just doesn't want to be alive.
It did before like, well, okay.
So this is a lesson and leave well enough alone.
We've talked about this before about messing around with stuff.
Turns out the factory was pretty good at putting things together and nobody else is as good as putting things together as a factory.
And so it'll never be as good as when it was put together by the factory.
Correct.
That's like a general philosophy that I hold.
This is why like original unmasked with cars are so good.
And I have this client who's like, I can't buy a car with that kind of kilometers on the odometer.
I just, it's never the same.
And I initially thought he was being a weenie.
And now that his time goes by, I'm like, oh, he's kind of onto something.
There's just like, when cars come apart and you do invasive stuff to them, statistically speaking,
I think there's a high likelihood that more, that problems will be introduced.
And there's like a beauty to a really like undisturbed time warp car.
This is true for complex cars.
You know, the car in question was an E34M5, which is, you know, it's a complicated motor.
And it's got a known steering box issue that a lot of steering box German cars have of just, they wear out.
And rebuilding is hard or impossible and parts are hard to find for those specific things.
So it's like one of those things where it's just like, ah, if you can afford, and this is,
we were again talking about this in the context of the Lexus LS,
which was on in your revelations episode that sold for no money on Hagerty marketplace.
That episode hasn't gone live yet, but yeah, sold for a couple of thousand bucks.
All this to say that when you buy a car and you're like, oh, I'm going to buy one, a cheap one,
because it's less money.
It's like the more time that goes by, the more I realize it's like, just spend twice as much.
And if instead it's 5,000, it's 10,000 or instead of 10,000, it's 20,000.
Unless you specifically want to be involved in the undertaking of everything you've just done with the rover,
it makes more sense to buy the nicest one you can afford,
because even if it costs twice as much in terms of opportunity costs of not getting to use the car
and the cost of un-fucking things, it is cheaper.
If you can do it yourself, you have a chance.
You have a chance, but it depends on how you work yourself.
Competent you are also, because if you have a learning curve,
it's going to make it worse.
Yeah, then you'll make the car worse.
And so it really does, in my opinion, the more time I spend doing this, it makes sense.
And if you can't afford the nice one, then it's like, just wait.
It's better to wait for a nice one.
Unless the cars just continue to do what the market's been doing recently,
in which case you're permanently out.
Yeah, but like Lexus LSs are not going up at, you know, like Porsche 911s.
Yeah, Porsche 911 might be the answer.
And then you buy when that's not running and you just leave it non-running and put it away as a sort of asset.
I will say that the, it all really depends on who did the work and the quality of the work.
Yes.
So you're perfectly right in saying it's more likely that.
My FWs, my two 16 valve Volkswagen's have both undergone massive surgery.
They're both new engines.
They're both completely gone through.
How many different cylinder heads have you had in your Scirocco?
I don't like your accusation.
No, this engine.
So here, so I'm on build nine, block seven.
No, block six.
So the idea was my next one will be block seven, build 10.
And that's it.
So this is the ninth engine I've had in the car.
This one's going to be the last one.
The one that's in there is fine, right?
It makes good power.
It gets great fuel economy.
It does everything fine, but it does use oil thanks to a bad machine shop.
Who caught the pistons and I've re-ringed it three times and whatever.
But those cars are ultimately really reliable.
I wouldn't hesitate to get into either of my Mark I Volkswagen's and drive them to Taunton, Massachusetts, where TWS is.
As long as you had with you, which spare parts?
I bring them a transmission, right?
You bring a transmission, right?
Depends on which one.
Depends on which car we're talking about.
The Scirocco, I was going to.
Bring one transmission.
Wait.
You bring an alternator.
Alternator always.
Yeah.
So hold on, but this is excuse me for a second.
This is old car, neurotic shit.
Number one, superstitious moron.
If I don't have the part, I'm going to need it.
If I have the part is never going to break.
That's my sort of thing.
You're referring to the last time I drove the Scirocco across country.
And I said, I think I'm going to pull the transmission because I'm stupid out of the cabriolet and put it in the trunk of the Scirocco for the drive across the country.
Because if I don't, the transmission is going to explode.
It had 110,000 miles on it.
They don't last that much longer than that.
There's a rivet that comes out of the differential ring gear.
Yes.
And self machines.
It made it from that point on 2.4 miles and exploded from the 2.4 miles from the time I said that the original transmission exploded.
I put a new one in and I don't travel with a new transmission anymore.
Okay.
But I knew it was.
If you bought a 26,000 mile one for kind of a lot of money, then this would not be a concern.
Not the transmission, but every other thing.
So I travel with ignition coil, fuel pump, distributor, all of the things that are just known that can pull the entire car down, right?
That stop all progress.
That's just old car, neurosis, like where the fuck am I getting in?
You know, a fuel pump in East Hell.
East Hell.
But that doesn't, the one car that I have that has never been apart ever in any way is the Mercedes.
So it is now 90, God, it's probably 97 or 98,000 kilometers on it.
So 60,000 miles approaching that.
And when I bought the car from the old woman, I asked her where the repair receipts were.
I called her the original owner and she said it didn't have any cause the car never broke.
Everything I've looked at in that car as original, nothing seems to have been touched.
It's the most reliable car I've ever owned.
In 12 years, it's given me no problems.
14 years.
Yeah, that's been pretty amazing to your point, right?
But oftentimes you buy a car in Germany that's been serviced by a German master tech.
I see them just about as good.
Most of the time they're just as good as now.
Yeah.
But you can sort of guarantee that outcome if you buy a undisturbed lower mileage car.
Most of the time.
Yeah.
Most of them.
It's a better bet.
Yes.
I think you are giving yourself the most favorable odds if you buy a nicer car.
And the fuck up here was, look, I did the whole, I sent the car to Michigan for a number of reasons.
You know, I knew it was going to be down for a couple months.
The red line team was looking for a Buick 215 and aluminum Rover V8 effectively to rebuild.
And I was fine to give it back.
I trust David.
Like I know he's a good mechanic.
You were also threatening to do a spicy build on this car well before that.
I was thinking about it.
I don't know if I would have ever gotten to it, but this was my opportunity to just hand it over and have someone do it.
My boss's boss's boss loves to remind me.
He's like, this, you, you benefited from this too.
Cause you know, when he hears me bitch about like, oh my God, the thing broke again.
He's right.
I did.
It winds up in theory.
I have an engine that is newer, more reliable and makes more power.
The reality of that has been anything but, right?
Transmission exploded.
That had nothing to do with the, there's nothing wrong with the transmission before the engine seized well.
And now this new one has an oil pressure.
The original one had great oil pressure, like perfect oil pressure.
So take one step forward, two steps back, you know, and it's, it's just a matter of getting through the teething stuff.
And once that happens, this should be reliable or as at least as reliable as it was.
And I suspect the motor itself, the engine itself will be far more reliable over the course of the next 10 years.
But you're just going to get past the initial stuff.
Yeah.
And that's the shake down thing and that's an expensive process.
And you always, you know, everyone has probably experienced this in some way or another or come across cars like this,
where someone has spent all this huge amount of effort of unfucking some car.
And they're like, I've had it.
I'm selling the car and you sell it to the next guy.
And the guy's like, it's been perfect.
You fixed everything.
And do you know how often that happens?
It's unbelievable.
My favorite one was my sister had, my sister had an 86 Jeep Cherokee coupe.
So two door, 2.5 automatic that she just, it was,
had been yellow and somebody painted it black and it sat for years and years.
They resurrected it, sprayed it and then sold it.
My sister wanted it.
And so stupidly, my father helped her buy it.
And the fucking thing broke.
Of course, resurrected after sitting for 10 years, broke continually.
And the worst one was the transmission exploded on the George Washington bridge.
And that was nasty.
The cops were screaming at her and, you know, it was New York.
So she was, it was just traumatic.
She gets it all together.
Three other things broke.
The radiator exploded.
All this other shit happened.
And then I was driving it and sitting in traffic on a hill waiting to get to red light and kaboom.
Just horrible sound.
Transmission exploded again, but I had no emergency brake and couldn't put in park.
It was the output shaft.
So the car was just in neutral and I had people screaming at me and got the fuck out of the way.
And I'm like, you guys got to go around me so I can back up into a ditch to put this thing up against the tree to wait for a tow truck.
Totally traumatic experience.
Everything broke.
I wound up selling it to a cop.
And then about a year later, I was scared to death.
Like this guy was going to come back and kill me.
But a year later, I'm in a restaurant with a bunch of friends and I look and he walks in and I threw myself onto the table and they're like,
what are you doing?
I'm like, shut up.
Just all of you shut up and I'm hiding.
And I just see these cop boots come right over and Jason.
I was like, oh shit.
I'm going to come out from underneath the table and the guys literally just going to shoot me in the face.
And so I put my cell phone on my pocket and I'm like put on the ground.
I'm like, oh, there it is.
Oh, hey, I think his name was Brian.
It's like literally years and years.
And he's, how you, how you doing?
He's like, oh, great.
How are you good to see you?
I'm like, great.
How's the Jeep?
He's like, man, it's been absolutely perfect.
And I'm like, it never made it.
This fucking car never made it a week without stranding my sister on the side of the road.
And now this guy is a year and a half later.
This is like the pickle jar, you know, I loosened it.
Right.
You can't get the pickle jar when you handed someone they immediately open it.
I loosened it.
I loosened it for you.
Yeah.
So we apparently prefixed all of the things that we're about to break for the police officer and is what are you going to do?
So I'm going to try to.
But you, that path, that potential cul-de-sac looks exactly the same as just heading down a path of interminable problems and just be like, how stupid am I going to be?
You don't know where the cul-de-sac is.
Continue dumping money in this thing.
And is it like, where does, what's around the next bend?
Is it a cliff or is it like just smooth sailing?
You have no idea.
No idea.
Right.
I mean, this car came back and the power locks don't work.
They did before.
We'll never know.
I mean, I haven't got around to testing it, but like this is the kind of things that make me twitch.
Cause I'm like, what happened?
What broke?
What part of mine are not going to be able to get?
It's a simple system.
I'm sure I'll figure it out.
But like, you did nothing.
You sat there.
Well, no one touched you for 15 months.
You fucking British piece of shit.
Like, why are you breaking?
The interior lights don't work.
General geriatric.
Yeah.
It's just, but the weird thing is two of the things that didn't work when we picked up the car in Edmonton that fixed themselves on the way home have now rebroken.
So it's Cytitis.
It's Cytitis.
Cytitis.
How to drive to Edmonton and back.
I guess halfway to Edmonton and back.
Well, this car has already racked up 10,000 kilometers, 6,000 miles in trucks just being transported in the last 15 months.
And it's about to do another 10, another round trip.
66 and a half kilometers.
Oh, kilometers.
Yeah.
Another 10,000 kilometers.
Most likely.
Let's see.
Hey, reliable.
So pretty though.
Yes.
Right.
Fastly improved by the addition of European spec lights and bumpers.
Until I get the clear corners that I really want.
I have one.
I have two.
Technically one broke on the way over.
So I have to order a new one.
And then that plus my British license plate that'll be here on Monday, like this is looking fantastic.
Looking fantastic.
And driving just maybe a little bit lacking in the oil, deficient in the oil pressure department, which brings us to the actual topic.
The conclusion of the episode.
There's only been like 30 something minutes.
We're only halfway there.
No, but we, but I parked this car.
I've been driving.
Next to another Rover SD one.
Not yet.
No, but a friend of mine has one.
And we, we were as two of them actually original or one of them he bought in 1980.
When do you think the last time a Rover SD one was parked next to another Rover SD one in the United States?
Accidentally.
You mean?
Sure.
Well, there, there, so there's a guy in Sacramento that has three of them to that driving one.
So it's happening right now.
So I asked the Haggerty insurance people to let me know how many we ensure control.
First, I had chat, GPT and Claude fight each other to estimate how many SD ones are left on the road in the US based on the original 1254 sales.
And I said use.
So the UK post will publish how many of every car.
The UK is very cool about this.
People will be like, there's 54 of these in the UK that are registered.
Yep.
So I had it, I had both of those, those AI platforms look up that and then said using similar attrition rates rates.
How many do you think are left in the US?
And they both came up with a number.
You want to guess?
11.
They both said between 20 and 30, most likely that are on the road and possibly 50 to 100 that are in some state of disrepair somewhere.
So I've insurance guys run run the report for me.
There are.
So my buddy here that has two of them doesn't clearly doesn't have him insured with Haggerty because he didn't show up in the list.
There are one mine plus three in Sacramento.
That's it for California.
Oh, for California.
No, I know there's the maroon one that's on the side of the road in LA that I want to send me pictures of circulating yellow one in Sacramento, right?
That's the guy.
So he's got a yellow one and a white one plus the parts car.
That's five.
So Sean is my local friend that's got two.
There's me and the maroon one.
So we know of seven in California.
Four of them are insured by Haggerty.
25.
25 SD ones insured by Haggerty are on the entire country and almost all of them are East Coast, which is strange.
Closer to England.
Yeah, I guess.
Fair point.
But like, you know, Southern states kind of kind of wild 25 of them.
Wow.
It's a big number more than I was expecting.
I mean, technically was more than you expected.
It's not a lot of cars.
No, no, of course.
When we don't know what condition, you know, and how drivable one of them.
One of them actually is the guy named Dave who sold me the headlights on this car in Kentucky.
Hi Dave, if you're listening.
Super nice guy.
He sent me a bunch of parts actually for this car.
And he's got a bunch of them because I think he races them in lemons, which you think it's not helping with the attrition rate.
I mean, it's probably just one that he just keeps pounding out the fenders and whatever else.
Anyway, but so anyway, I parked this car in the street or on the parking lot and people were coming over and saying, man, that's a beautiful car.
I've never, I never, ever had anyone say that before the bumper conversion.
They would always say, wow, that's a great color or what is that?
No one ever said beautiful car and everywhere I've gone with this car in the last two weeks.
It's just waves, smiles, attention and so many people saying it's so beautiful, which got me to thinking.
It's the lights and bumpers.
Okay.
It's the lights and bumpers.
So therefore, it started a conversation with a bunch of friends about cars that were ruined by federal, North American federal regulations and specifically lights and bumpers, possibly even side markers, but not really.
So my question to you is what are the, and I have chat GPT also has some suggestions.
Let's talk about what cars were the worst ruined by federal bumpers?
Or are there any other safety regulations like a third brake light or a passenger airbag?
The R107 Mercedes SLR107.
It's up there.
The problem with the R107 is that those park bench bumpers also came with the US sealed beam quad round headlights, which I think actually work somehow almost better with the design of the car than the square original European.
I would still choose the Euro lights, but I see what you're saying.
I think that the four headlights widen the headlights and make the thing look less sleeker, lower, because if you look at the contour of the US versus Euro turn signals, they're actually shaped differently because the headlights are wider on the US cars.
So I see what you're saying.
I still would choose the Euro lights, but I know what you mean.
116, you know, obviously Mercedes 116 S class, you would see this as a 300 SD here, most commonly, but 450 SEL and 280.
Those are very bad.
The 115 also is really strong.
That's the predecessor of the 123.
That's a bad example.
But I think with 116, when you have a car that's 200 inches long, an additional six inches of bumper length is not.
It's the amount of unsupported bumper though.
And the fact that they stick out so far from the extremity of the car, that's why I chose 107 over 116.
I think 116 is not, is egregious, but not as bad as 107 because the car is shorter.
You're going to go on a list of 15 different Mercedes.
Maserati Bora.
Because I was going to say, actually, I think Mercedes is the worst offender at integrating bumpers of anyone.
MGB.
MGB.
MGB.
That's a pretty good one.
A really strong contender.
Maserati Bora's are pretty bad.
Kuntosh's.
Kuntosh was on my list for sure.
Especially the front US bumper where it's got the double stack.
That's really catastrophic.
And the back is horrible.
That you have to pull this off.
No one leaves them on.
The back is horrible as well.
I mean, bumperettes of 996s and stuff and some of the 70s.
That's subtle.
There's some current stuff that's not great.
But I would say SD1 is one of them.
That was a substantial difference.
And it was headlights.
Yeah, the headlights definitely.
According to published length, it is six inches difference between.
But what is a 116?
I don't know.
It's got to be more than that.
I thought this car was a foot.
I mean, I genuinely would have thought it would be a foot difference.
We mustn't forget BMW.
We mustn't forget the N-E30 and E23.
E30.
Think about an early like an 84 E30.
That's a no.
I'd rather not think about that.
Especially when the Euro.
Especially when the chrome little strip Euro bumpers E21 as well.
E21's bumpers were hideous.
But E28 also lost the big little headlights that were just so beautiful.
But at least they're the same shape and form language.
I think when you have a thing like the Rover SD1 or the Mercedes approach
where you go from like a very what was in the 1970s
very contemporary looking block of glass
that's all sort of expensively engineered
and actually works really well.
Are these wonderful headlights at night?
Yeah, they work well.
Yeah, the 116 is the same.
The Euro 116 lights are wonderfully functional.
Much more functional than a US R129 having owned both.
Which is 10 years later.
And that's a much more sophisticated car.
So you go from like this sort of very contemporary 70s
everything's made of straight lines and, you know,
to these sort of crappy five and three quarter inch round headlights
that have quite literally been used since 1958
on American cars continuously.
And they're, you know, you don't replace the light bulb.
You replace the whole light.
So the light, the lamp itself is cheap and shitty
because it's a replaceable part as opposed to designed to last.
And it's 1940s lighting technology.
So I mean, huge difference for the,
when you have the headlight shape change.
I mean, all look at a Mercedes W201 was another one.
So the early cars with the recessed square seal beam
in this big large.
And 126s.
126 same thing.
Horrendous.
Actually, I'm going to say,
Scirocco was one of the worst defenders in both.
People like the double, Mark II Scirocco I'm talking about.
People like the double sealed beam look.
And I understand why there was a trim piece below
and I believe below and above it
because the sealed beams were so much shorter height wise
than the factory headlights.
And the factory headlights were kind of truckish
because they were so tall.
My car, I have a little spoiler on top to
visually slim them.
But those bumpers were,
I mean, you could easily sit comfortably on the rear bumper
in those cars and all day.
That's true as the E28 also having owned.
But as a Scirocco is probably 10 inches shorter.
And so the smaller the car gets, the worse.
The more egregious.
A significant percentage of the car becomes a bumper.
And that's not good.
No.
And so, but I think my actual worst,
my final choice for the,
my vote for the worst ever for our E308 GT4.
Yeah.
I wouldn't consider owning a US car.
Like a US spec bumper car.
I mean, my car's been converted.
Wouldn't even consider because the car went from the best part,
the best, first of all,
the bumpers wrap around the corners
and cover the best part of the car,
which is the tuck under of the front and rear overhangs.
But then they combined it with a boxer paint job, paint scheme.
Well, those are separate.
You could get those in Europe.
Yeah, you could.
But mostly they're combined that way.
And that sort of,
that did had a trick of masking the big rubber corner
that they put on the bumper.
So the, which was black.
And so that faded into a black, lower balancing.
And then the rear bumper had this full diaper underneath
where they had covered up the muffler with this black grate.
It looks like a heater vent.
Yeah.
I genuinely think that's,
that's the only car I could think of where I would not.
Now I've converted, I've, where I wouldn't own.
I've converted so many of my 308s converted to Euro bumpers.
My Scirocco is, my Rover is,
and I'm sure I have other cars that I've converted also.
So I've converted and, you know, my E30s are late.
So they already have the Euro bumpers on them from the factory.
And European.
Yep.
And the Cabriolet is same thing.
But I would not own a 308 GT4 with those USB.
I couldn't look at it.
Okay.
So then this, the most egregious offenders with bumpers are always
from the early era before they came to the deformable plastic.
So when they would just slap a huge piece of metal on a shock absorber,
that was always where you'd have the biggest problems.
Because then later on there were Euro bumpers,
like for the 126 for example, where it's like an integrated form,
but they're just bigger.
And I think the Euro cars look much nicer,
but it's not nearly as pronounced as the earlier cars
because of the difference is smaller,
because they started figuring out how to visually integrate the US bumpers
in a more appealing way.
And, you know, I would say the first people who really did a good job
of integrating US bumpers properly was Porsche with the 74 911.
It just became something they did for the entire global market,
other than the rear bumperettes are much wider.
So they never, they didn't have the G body accordion bumper cars.
There was no difference.
Other than that, you got a little reflector, an additional reflector,
which was integrated into the area where there's normally a rub strip.
And so the visual integration of the front reflector is like perfect.
And the rear reflector, they put it into the turn signal,
which wraps around the side of the car anyway, so you can't,
so the reflectors you are not present.
And the rear bumperettes are wider because instead of having a Euro bumper,
you have a US bumper.
So you've, they filled in that extra space by making the bumper, it's wider.
But that's it.
But that's it.
That's the right thing to do.
Yes.
Porsche did a brilliant job in 1974, you know,
Mercedes was fucking around and so was BMW for another decade.
Right.
Or in the case of the 107, two decades, a decade and a half of horrible,
egregious, you know, solutions.
Whereas Porsche just was like, we're going to do this right.
I'm shocked that a company is small as Porsche.
And, you know, that Mercedes wasn't able to come up with something.
It had to have been ego.
It had to have been like, we are not caring about the US market because fuck them.
Because they, of course, the engineering might,
they had the engineering might to do anything they wanted.
Well, yes.
But then when they did the 126, they did a very good job of saying,
we're going to have a deformable plastic that re, you know,
pumps back out such that when it hits, it gets hit at five miles per hour.
It sort of returns to its original position.
And that was like the right proper engineer Mercedes types of solution.
Has anyone else done that?
The deformable plastic.
When the 126 came out in 1980.
I don't think so.
Yeah.
No.
To me, it's amazing how much the difference bumpers make.
I just had my Scirocco together with my friends Corrado at 034 Motorsport,
which is a VW Audi tuner, had an open house,
like a big, basically barbecue and car show.
And the Scirocco and Corrado were next to each other.
And I realized that our cars are four or five years apart,
but look 20 because the Corrado had that beautiful integrated bumper
that just flows with the line of the car.
And the Scirocco, even with the tiny little Euro bumpers,
it's clearly an appendage.
And that was the way that a lot of people,
a lot of manufacturers modernized their car designs during this period.
If you needed to do a facelift and you couldn't afford to design
a whole ass new car, you would put those bumpers on it.
So that's kind of what the Clipper kit does sort of,
although it's still a separate bumper,
but you're trying to add sort of valences and skirts
to sort of make the bumpers look more monolithic.
I think a really good example of this would be Jaguar XJS.
They did this for 94 on a design that was 20 years old at the time.
Who else?
Citroën CX did this where they went from like a bumper
that looked very similar to the Rover SD1 bumper
into like an integrated deformable plastic bumper to modernize
because the CX was in production for 15 years.
Who else?
Did anybody else that you can think of do that where they took old stuff?
Oh, E30.
E30 is a great example.
E24 to some extent, kind of too.
Yeah, I'm trying to think, no.
But what I do like about this is the idea that it's a simple replaceable part
that if you do have a little bit of a partially shunt,
you just get rid of it and put a new one on, you're not painting something.
That bumper probably from the factory was 100 bucks
versus $1,000 for a deformable plastic piece plus another 1,000 to paint it.
You scratch a bumper in a modern car and it's just ruinous.
It's part of the bodywork.
That's also part of the coefficient of drag.
I mean, it's part of everything.
Oh, 964 is another example of this, I guess, kind of.
Let me see what ChatGPT had said for other cars that were egregious.
Most commonly, Euro converted today.
Euro is a very important term.
E21, E24, 9-11, W126, MGB.
9-11, that's nonsense.
I agree with that.
Worst bumper transformation, they're calling it MGB.
It's in the first place.
BMW E21, E24, Kuntas and Jaguar XJ.
XJ?
Oh, series 2 XJ.
Must be.
2 and 3.
There's no difference between the series 3 and the series.
There is a difference, but it's just that they put a longer rubber doohickey in the
middle part on the series 3.
But on the series 2, it's like the Euro cars have like delicate chrome bumpers in the
style of a 1960s car.
In the US car, they added a full width rubber block that looks like a 308 one that sits
kind of over or underneath, I guess, the chrome slim bumper.
It looks really doofy.
Alpha Spider is another one.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, that was a bad one.
Yeah.
GTV6 is actually quite subtle compared to the Spider.
Yeah.
But yeah, Alpha Spider is a great one that we've skipped over.
Mazda already bore eyes.
Horrible.
One of the worst, in my opinion.
What do you think is the worst?
We've definitely said it.
It's one of the cars that we've already said.
Is it a BMW or a Mercedes?
Probably.
MGB is definitely outrageous too.
So you asked a question right before we turn the cameras on.
Oh, yes.
Europe.
Why is it always European cars?
Were there any Japanese cars that suffer the same fate and we just didn't know because
we're not used to seeing the JDM version of the car here?
I don't know.
This brings us to Marysville, Ohio.
This is why we were talking about Marysville, Ohio and the outside is, you know, your point
was going to be, I think, that they designed a whole US car, not just US bumpers, which
was the first time that that happened because they had plants in Marysville, Ohio.
So they were like, imported car companies were trying to figure out how to sell cars
in the United States.
And they were like, well, the American market just has such dramatically different demands
that we may as well just design a whole car that is.
See how pretty it is the Rover has just turned its own lights on.
The light box was so excited about the SD1.
Sorry.
Keep talking.
Talk amongst yourself.
So the Japanese figured that they were going to build enough cars and that they wanted to
succeed in the United States badly enough that they would.
We've got a strobe in here, a disco.
That's not good.
Your choice is 100 or zero.
Or alternating between the two on its own.
So they figured they would just design a whole car for the US market.
And I think that makes sense for a company like Honda who's going to build cars in a
volume that I'm just going to put my sunglasses on.
I mean, it seems very unhappy, but it seems to have entered one of its weird modes.
Can I just turn it?
Oh my God.
A remarkable achievement.
Stable at 30% lighter.
Oh, no, it doesn't like that.
Sorry.
Dedicated car for the US market.
Which is funny because the Honda did Marysville, Ohio.
Volkswagen did Westmorel in Pennsylvania.
But they just continued to build the same car as they did in Europe.
Just horrible.
Yeah.
And bumpers.
And of course, almost every other Japanese manufacturer followed suit in some way.
I think they didn't have the corporate arrogance and ego of saying,
we have this world product that's already successful.
So we're not going to change it.
We're just going to add to it for the US market.
I think Japan was so focused on making the right car for the right market that they
didn't, they just didn't do that.
I don't know of any, and we're going to get, I'm sure, comments on this.
And I hope we do.
Like there must be 70s.
Like, all right, you go to the 74 Celica, for example.
They must have had big.
Yeah.
Dots and Z.
Z.
There you go.
Okay.
This is where we've gotten there.
They should just probably erase this whole episode and start with the Z because we're
such Eurocentric snobs, but you're right.
Z is perfect example.
Yes.
There were not a lot of Japanese cars that sold in large volumes that we can sort of
conjure to mind, I think, from that era.
Yeah.
For me.
It doesn't naturally come to me.
2000 GT was too early to get bumpers.
For sure.
And there were hundreds of units anyway.
Maybe 2002 is another car that really suffered from brakes from rear lights.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Rear lights were not pretty, but not nearly as far as the little roundies, which.
They don't offend me that much.
I think part of it is that when you see like a turbo 2002 with the small bumper, it's like
you're getting sort of a different experience that is cool in its own way.
But yes, obviously the roundies are nicer.
Even Beetle.
Early Beetle versus late Beetle.
So the Beetle that I have in my yard, which is a really embarrassing thing to admit.
Yeah, but you did it on purpose.
You have to own it.
It's been a year and I haven't done anything with it.
So I think it's officially a junked car in my yard and not a piece of art.
That's the 73 and I could not bear looking at the back of it.
So I had to angle it.
So I never see the back because of those harps.
73 was the first year for the huge circle lights.
Circle tail lights.
I hate them.
Whereas, you know, I, my first car ever when I was 14 was a 72 and it had the medium sized
tails, which I find that.
Which are the ones that are shaped like the bottom of an iron.
Like if you took an iron, like it's flat on bottom.
It's like two stone shaped.
I don't know.
Um, but yeah, those bumpers got big for a while there.
Other weird things that happened, like, you know, my 96 cabrio has no glove box, which
is another one of these like unintended consequences of us wrecks.
94 became the first year of mandatory passenger side airbags.
Really that early.
94.
Yeah.
I did not know that early.
So Mercedes 124s have this where you don't get a glove box or you have an airbag.
Starting in 1994.
Uh, it depends on which model of the car it is.
Uh, this also happens on 129s.
There's no R129s in the U S market that have glove boxes.
Yeah.
And I think this was if I researched this, I would venture to guess though, this was
kind of a surprise legislation.
So at the time they were looking at the U S mandated drivers airbags starting in, I think
it was 91.
Your choice was in a car that early for all cars for all cars.
Mercedes started in 86.
All air, all U S cars had airbags.
Driver's airbag.
Driver's airbag.
But then I'm pretty sure starting 91, the rule was your choice was you could either have
a driver airbag or or a motor mouse.
Well, they didn't have to be one round.
Some sort of automatic driver seatbelt, either one that was attached to the doorframe like,
you know, Beretta did, um, or motorized and, uh, but the wild thing was so that was effectively
mandated.
The one that's attached to the door, people would just unfasten them and leave them unfastened
anyway, right?
There was a buzzer.
Well, the bigger issue is if you left it fastened, you then had to put the lap belt on.
And so what wound up happening was the death rate actually went up because people were
not using the lower half, which is the, which is the main restraint and they were getting
decapitated and impacts.
So your submarine, which is, you know, going under under the steering wheel, head gets cut
off.
So that wound up being that going from mandated to outlawed very, very quickly.
Um, and in 94, it was dual airbags fully required by law.
And I suspect that happened so quickly.
Um, I suspect it happened quickly.
And that's the explanation why so many cars in the nineties suddenly lost their airbags.
I don't think the glove box glove boxes.
I don't think that car companies had enough time to properly engineer a workaround.
So like a 93.
Again, Porsche did a very good job of this by adding a knee pad below the dash and putting
the glove box down there.
And that was just like they, they went directly from no airbags to standard dual airbags in
one swoop in 1990 for the 911.
Dual in 1990.
That's early.
Yeah.
And it still had a glove box.
Wow.
Like everything now has gloves on.
It's funny for all of the like old fashioned shit that Porsche was doing whenever there
was like a mandatory safety regulation.
It was like, they would be like, okay, fine, we'll do a good job of this.
I wonder if it was, it was the platform of the car from 1963.
But I wonder if it was corporate conscience or if it was just budget because they're like,
all right, we see this coming.
We do it once and we'll do it right.
Right.
And I have a feeling that's that's, that was Porsche's way.
Just do it once.
We don't have time to Mickey Mouse this shit, three or four patches, but like a 93 Corolla,
for example, has a glove box, a 94 has an airbag instead.
Same thing with the 93 Golf.
So clearly they, they knew it was coming, but just didn't have it ready or didn't care
to or whatever.
It's kind of wild to see this also, you know, some 1986 cars with the chimzol, the center
high mounted stoplight, the third brake light that was a one year, was it in Porsche?
That's a one year only 1986 integration where they moved it shortly thereafter.
They moved it around a number of times during the production of the Carrera 3.2.
It was, it was, I think it started at the top, then they moved it to the bottom of the
windscreen, then they moved it back to the top.
So 87 is the only year where it's at the bottom of the windscreen on a coupe.
I don't know why they moved it and then moved it back to the place where it was in 86.
So yeah, I mean, have we covered all of the really egregious ones?
I think the, the advent of deformable plastic bumpers really solved that.
And then the, the sort of arrow headlight thing for 1986 model year.
Thanks Ford Taurus.
Really cause you know, once they allowed Ford Taurus to do that and you know, GM started.
We've told the story, but you remember how that was, how that went through.
Oh my God, it's been a while now.
So the DOT would only allow seal beams, right?
Headlights starting in three sizes and shapes.
You could get big circle, small circle or square.
That's it.
And actually then later on, many years later, they had a smaller square.
We're like the Camaro, the 90s Camaro stuff, but that hadn't happened yet.
Ford was trying to petition for arrow headlights before, sorry, for flush headlights and different
replaceable bulbs.
This was like Thunderbird and Taurus 80s, early 80s.
And it kept getting denied.
And some lawyer realized that the EPA, hold on cafe, right?
Corporate annual average fuel economy ultimately rolled up to department of transportation.
So what they said was this was actually a safety issue.
No, hold on.
And I'm sorry, I'm getting this completely wrong.
The DOT rolled up to EPA one way or another.
The organization that was stopping them from doing lighting, which must have been DOT.
I did, this is in my Ford Taurus, a revelation video, which is now four years old.
Ultimately, they said there was no way they could meet the corporate average fuel economy
standards if they didn't get these lights.
So they sort of rebranded them arrow lights.
The idea of being, they're helping with aerodynamics so that we can't.
I mean, they do.
They do.
But without them, we cannot hit our cafe targets and therefore you are polluting.
Like that's the argument they made.
You government here to help these people.
That's right.
It was the DOT, which is there to help the safety.
You and them not letting us have these arrow headlights are actually killing people with pollution instead.
That's how they got that.
It is part of a long and illustrious American tradition of preventing superior lighting solutions for no reason whatsoever.
See also, you know, LED and laser headlights.
See also the fact that they're preventing on the boat from happening right now,
but every car on the road is blinding this shit out of us all because they're not enforcing their own rules.
And they're all these loopholes in it.
Our lighting, the lighting department at the department of transportation should be.
It's literally decades worth of negligence and bullshit.
Yeah.
Speaking of rovers.
And we're back, right?
Back to the rover.
Wrap it around for that.
Well then, I guess that means it's time to end the episode.
I think so.
I think we've complained enough about ugly bumpers, ugly lights, poor build quality, oil pressure.
Yes.
And other such rover.
We deliver.
We aim to deliver on the name.
It does what it says on the box.
Yes.
With the Carmogen show.
Carmogen show, they're going to bitch about everything.
And we have.
But wish me luck.
Light a candle, pray.
Don't light any fires near any, any cars.
Pray for the rover, but also.
You should get a sandwich cart for reliable transport, where you get a stamp, you know, a whole punch for every transcontinental move.
And on the 44th one, you get a free transcom.
Yeah.
I'm going to, I should call reliable and say at this point you've shipped this car 58 times.
I don't know.
We'll see.
We'll see what happens.
TBD, this is another cliffhanger, not in the, in the intercooler column.
But I do mean it when I'm, when I say I'm incredibly thankful.
When I crashed this car and I showed up to Jay Leno, I said, this is why you need really good insurance.
And I have fucking great insurance.
And the fact that this car is sitting right here, drivable is a testament to that.
So go ensure the shit out of your cars, not fraudulently, don't take advantage of anyone, but make sure you're properly insured.
Because when something happens, you're going to want to make sure it's fixable.
Amen.
So, yeah.
All right.
Thank you.
Bye.
About this episode
Collector-car insurance and the ugly results of U.S.-market regulations collide in Carmudgeon Ep. 245. Hagerty coverage gets credited for keeping a Rover SD1 project alive after a crash and for valuing cars by replacement cost. The show then zooms out to explain why U.S. bumpers and sealed-beam lighting often look worse in Europe, with examples like the 1996 Chevy Impala and a long list of bumper offenders. Between the styling talk, there’s plenty of real-world SD1 gearbox and oil-pressure drama.
Today’s episode of The Carmudgeon Show is a bumper episode. It’s also a headlight, taillight, and side market episode - all of the above which were effected greatly in the mid-1970s to 1980s by updated US Department of Transportation regulations in 1974.===Visit http://JasonSentMe.com to get a Hagerty Guaranteed Value (TM) collector-car insurance quote! ===
But first, a Rover update!! The Rover is back (temporarily) on the west coast - we get some long awaited updates, new plans, and of course a new chapter of the saga which may send the car back where it just was……the project never stops!
5-mph bumpers were one of the crucial components removed from the Rover to make it tolerable to look at today. These US-mandated bumpers (and headlights and taillights) the bane of existence for many European and Japanese manufactures in period. Most of these manufactures were so perturbed by this regulation, that the bumper integration became a bit of an afterthought. Cars like the Mercedes-Benz R107 and W116 were considered some of the worst offenders given the size and integration of the bumper in comparison to the car’s raw proportions. Other cars like the BMW E21, E23, E24, E28, and E30 were also repeat offenders. Other cars mentioned include but are not limited to: Maserati Bora, Lamborghini Countach, Rover SD1, Volkswagen Scirocco (MK2) + Cabriolet, Citroen CX, Jaguar XJS, Alfa Romeo Spider, Honda Accord, Datsun Z, BMW 2002, Volkswagen Beetle, Toyota Corolla, Ford Taurus, and Ford Thunderbird.
Rarely, did a manufacture decide they would go the extra mile and integrate the bumper into the design of the car - the G-body Porsche 911 and Chevrolet Corvette C3 were one of the few of the time.
And if you didn’t get enough Rover air time this episode or need a recap, Jason’s just written a 5 column article for The Intercooler about his experience so far - you can red it here: https://www.the-intercooler.com/library/features/america-fast-part-two/
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