This will be a rant most people won't care about, but at least you people appreciate cars, so this is really the only place I can rant.

Anyway, as my love of Rover is well documented, it annoyes the hell out me when people talk about the superiority of Honda.
"Oh, you bought a Coupe with a Rover engine?! You'll be buying new headgaskets every 5000 miles, which will take ages to reach because of the incredible unreliability of the K-Series" etc.

Anyway, I got my MOT test yesterday (a legal requirement as a test of roadworthyness), which read thus: absolutely no mechanical failures and the emissions on my 11 year old car..... well, I wasn't sure the engine was actually on except for the fact the sheet had my rpm's on it.

Anyway, on my sheet, hydrocarbons (you know, that get spat out of the exhaust because the cylinders aren't burning fuel properly due to the engine being fucked) you are allowed 200 parts per million, and I got 6.

CO2, is required to be below 0.300% vol. and my lovely Rover engined car got 0.002%

And finally, the lambda sensor. Within the preset limits, I read that if a car runs a reading over 1.000, the engine is running rich, and under 1.000 it is running lean. And guess what, I got exactly 1.000.

80,000 miles, original headgasket, engine as efficient as when it was new, and I put it on a rolling road a month or so ago, and in 11 years it has lost 4bhp and 6lb-ft of torque (about as much torque as a Honda engine actually develops).

Fuck you all you Honda lovers!!!

Ah, I feel so much better now.

I was trying to think of a way to make this into a conversational thread, but I can't. If I do I'll edit this. As it is, just offer me comfort and virtual pie.

Those numbers are impressive, actually.

Good buy.

Faulty testing equipment?

Faulty testing equipment?

Human error?

Somebody is still going to come in here and claim that they they know a guy that is friends with a guy that has a honda civic with 500k miles on it that does not leak/burn a drop of oil and that makes 300hp. It is a fact of life that most teenagers think honda engines are the fucking holy grail of car engines and will bash anything non-honda.

I'm considering a K-series conversion for my mini. It's a good engine.