I was just 12 years old in the summer of 2010 when my parents announced that the family would be jetting off to Switzerland for our two-week-long family vacation, having scored some last-minute plane tickets on the cheap. Naturally, this sparked a great deal of excitement within my wide-eyed former self, as I’d never been to continental Europe and hadn’t even left the country since a jaunt up to Vancouver as a toddler. But the prospects that elevated my youthful anticipation weren’t so much those of seeing historic buildings or picturesque towns or gorgeous mountain scenery; those were all well and good, but the main draw for me was something else entirely. It wasn’t even the cars, believe it or not, which may seem odd given the venue for this increasingly haphazard bit of storytelling. It was the car brands.
There’s a lot more where this came from.
[Author’s Note: As you can probably tell, this article has very little to do with this particular Sterling and far more to do with how I first began my own CC hunt, vis-à-vis my search for a Sterling. If you’d like to learn more about Sterlings, I highly suggest reading these articles by our very own CC editors.]
See, for whatever reason (I find as I get older that it’s increasingly difficult to pry into the mind of my younger self) earlier that summer I had developed a rather unhealthy fascination with photographing the logos of as many brands as I could. Not a single household appliance could escape my quick trigger on the shutter button of my father’s trusty Fuji F10, and the dozens of blurry closeups quickly piled up. All completely useless, of course. But I can only assume it gave me some sort of satisfaction, given that I kept pressing onward. And it would have been just another unremarkable manifestation of childlike curiosity, had the trip eastward not mapped that curiosity onto an underlying lifelong interest. For I had all but run out of brands in my house to photograph by the time we packed our bags; Kenmore and KitchenAid and the like had been thoroughly documented, and I was in need of some fresh material.
A small selection of my Swiss logo captures.
Enter the European car brands. I knew that the Swiss enjoyed a wide selection of car choices from many manufacturers who dared not peddle their wares on our shores, or whose previous dabbles in peddling said wares were somewhat cataclysmic. I now had the opportunity to scope out these foreign merchants on their home turf and add their various insignia to my digital encyclopedia. And so began my great Car Project, launched as an established entity on August 19, 2010; some five months before this website became its own independent entity, and more than a year before I discovered it (as evidenced by my first comment, on a CC Clue for a 1972 Toyota Corona coupe). It began with a single picture of an Audi logo in the grille of a circa-1992 Audi S2 Avant (yes, I know we get Audis here in the US, but I hadn’t yet progressed my logo chronicles to the car stage until I went abroad), and it continues today, almost nine years later.
By now (if my incessant prattling hasn’t scared you off by now) you’re probably wondering how this has anything to do with a 1991 Sterling 827 SLi. Or, if you’ve followed the (il)logical progression of my twelve-year-old mind, you’ve realized how this has everything to do with it. See, after spending two weeks in Switzerland I had crossed off almost every common car logo from my list. Most of the rare care brands in the US (like Peugeot, Renault, Lancia, Opel, etc.) were not so rare in Europe, mostly because they’re European brands. And whatever American brands I hadn’t found in Switzerland were crossed off very quickly after I returned home. So by the middle of September my once-prolific searches were coming up dry, and I was running out of new territory to cover. But there was one more door to open before I closed the book on my logo search.
The final quandary, the last stronghold against the tyrannical throes of my lens, was the set of car brands we got here in the United States, but that never made it across the pond. Some of these were simple, and I recorded them almost immediately: Acura, or Saturn, or Eagle, for example. But, I wondered, surely there were more? Maybe even some that I hadn’t heard of? And so I took to the internet in search of these mysteriously unknown brands who dared evade my grasp. It wasn’t long before I dialed in on a new target: Sterling.
Image: productioncars.com
As I mentioned before, our CC editors have already covered the Sterling story admirably. As such, I won’t get into much detail here, because I’d be both wasting my time and insulting their good work on the same subject. If you’re unfamiliar with Sterling, I would highly suggest reading their excellent articles (linked in the introduction and at the end of this article) to get a bit more background. But the basic gist of it is that Sterling was a creation by ARCONA (Austin Rover Cars of North America) to regain a foothold in the American market after several large-scale disasters using the Rover name, the last of which being the ill-fated import of the Rover 3500 (SD1 for all you non-American folks) in 1980.
British Leyland was in dire straits financially by the late 1970s, and entered a partnership with Honda that resulted in the co-developed Rover 800 series and Honda (Acura) Legend of 1986, after the Rover Group was spun off earlier that year, following the spinoff of Austin Rover in 1982. (Don’t ask me any more about how the British automotive industry worked in the 1980s. In fact, I’m fairly certain the British themselves hadn’t a clue.) ARCONA subsequently imported the Rover 800 from 1987-1991, using the newly-created Sterling brand name to avoid Americans’ negative connotations associated with the Rover marque.
For the first two years, Sterling offered only one model: the 825 sedan, which sold decently well in 1987 before experiencing a 37% sales decrease the next year, due in no small part to electrical gremlins and build quality concerns (as well as the novelty wearing off). In 1989, the Sterling received a larger 2.7L Honda engine and was appropriately renamed the Sterling 827. With the 1989 model year also came the 827 SLi hatchback, a rather handsome shape that also served the dual purpose of differentiating the Sterling from its Acura counterpart, as the Legend was offered in a sedan bodystyle only.
Unfortunately for ARCONA, Americans were none too keen on overpriced hatchbacks, and the damage to Sterling’s reputation was already terminal by the time the hatchback arrived anyway. Sterling limped on until 1991, selling fewer cars in its last three years than it had in its first alone. It was yet another unmitigated disaster for Rover, and one of the final nails in the coffin for the last major independent British automaker. The Rover Group was sold to BMW in 1994, and only the success of its Land Rover brand prolonged its inevitable demise until 2000 (when Land Rover was acquired by Ford, consigning Rover to a slow and painful death that mercifully ended five years later).
Having read all this (at a very superficial level, mostly consisting of Sterling = rare), my twelve-year-old self still wasn’t convinced that Sterling was worthy of being anointed as my CC Holy Grail. After all, Merkur (another company that I had just discovered) offered many of the same eccentricities and rarity, and a similar uniquely-American-market logo. But then I saw Sterling’s badge, and I was hooked. It was majestic: a royal coat of arms swathed in silver and black, featuring a red cross and a literal down-to-earth evocation of Peugeot’s prancing lion. It was then that I decided that I absolutely must find a Sterling, and add its logo to the annals of my collection. And so my journey began.
It began by asking my father whether he had ever heard of Sterling, since I knew he had been in the market for a (much cheaper) car around the time Sterlings were being sold. He replied that he had, and that he remembered one running about our neighborhood until fairly recently. I quizzed him for more details about the car, and he then recalled us walking past it some years previously, and him pointing it out to me. Of course, I immediately began racking my brain, searching for some recollection of this now-precious memory. Where had I seen this shape before? Where were we walking? What were we doing?
And then it all came flooding back to me. I remembered the car – though I didn’t know what it was at the time. It was a red sedan, with five-spoke wheels, perched on a slightly elevated driveway on the left side of a small house, underneath a tree growing from the left side. We were walking to a local brunch place that my family frequented, and it was on the right side of the street as we walked south.
I realize this may sound a bit far-fetched. How could I remember something I saw as a child so clearly after not thinking about it for years? But my memory (as I’m sure some of yours do as well) has always had a strange affinity for cars. I still remember the red Chevy Cavalier my family rented on vacation when I was 3, and the white Isuzu Oasis minivan that I rode in on the way to my best friend’s birthday party in preschool. I remember the beige Ford Explorer my kindergarten teacher drove, and the bright red Celica my first-grade teacher had. In fact, I could probably rattle off every rental car my family’s ever driven. So while it’s possible the Sterling was a manufactured memory, it was also very possible it was a genuine one. I hopped onto Google Maps and scoured Street View in the area I had narrowed down the car’s location to, searching up and down several streets, looking for a match of the picture I had formed in my mind. And while I didn’t find a perfect match, there were two driveways between my house and the restaurant that looked awfully similar to what I had imagined. But there was no Sterling in either of the driveways. How odd.
Over the next few weeks I trekked up and down the streets, hoping for any trace of the Sterling’s reappearance. Maybe the owner had a strange work schedule. Maybe they were on vacation and left it at the airport. Maybe they lent it to somebody else for a while. But as the days ticked on I realized that the car was gone. Perhaps it was never there in the first place. Perhaps I had imagined the whole thing. I looked through every picture my family had ever taken, through historical satellite imagery, through every resource I could find. And at the end of the day, I found nothing to suggest the car had ever existed. I was crushed. But not yet defeated.
With my parents, I began to walk through my neighborhood (and the surrounding areas), looking for a Sterling: if not the one I remembered, any one would do. And somewhere along the way, I started taking pictures not just of logos, but of the cars themselves. My collection grew steadily. Ten cars, then twenty, then another twenty and another forty, and two months later I was pushing 150 cars photographed. Looking back, some of them were pretty lame (Jeep Wrangler? Scion xD? Plymouth Voyager?) but others were genuine finds (Volvo PV544, Rambler Marlin, Peugeot 504 to name a few). And then one day, I struck gold.
I wasn’t even looking for cars, necessarily. It was Halloween of 2010, and my family was returning home after a visit to the pumpkin patch with my grandparents. I’d brought my camera with us to document the day’s events, but as we neared home my it was my eyes that were pointed outside through the window, scanning the streets for any sign of car-related life. We meandered down streets I’d been up and down many times before, and I was beginning to chalk this journey up as another unfruitful one. But just as I was about to give up hope, we flashed by a familiar-looking dark shape parked near the corner of a side street. I dropped whatever I was holding and immediately began fumbling for my camera, and pleading with my mother to stop and go back. My mom (bless her heart) indulged me, and we turned around to go back and look. And as we got closer and closer, there was no mistaking it: I had finally found a Sterling.
It wasn’t the Sterling that I had recalled: it wasn’t even a sedan. It was the much-rarer 827 SLi hatchback version (and a manual, at that) which couldn’t have topped 5,000 total sales in the US, and hasn’t ever been featured on this website. At the time, I didn’t think much of that, but looking back, it was quite the find. I took some fairly horrible shots of it, and then, finally, added the logo to my collection. My journey was complete. But in the process, it had sparked a new journey that continues to this day. I now have taken pictures of 2,852 separate cars; some old, some new, some rare, some largely un-noteworthy. But it’s been a great deal of fun for me, and it’s a constantly rewarding hobby: every time a new adventure, visiting a new neighborhood with new cars. And I get some good exercise in the process, since I look for cars almost exclusively by bike now. But it all started with the determination to find this oddball British-Japanese clunker with a cool badge on the front.
I saw the Sterling again a few years later, and took some better pictures; you can probably tell which are old and which are new(er). But I haven’t seen it since, and judging by its VIN not being smogged in California since 2014, it has likely joined the great Rover in the sky along with the rest of its kin. So it goes. But that’s been my mission ever since: to document the cars rapidly disappearing from our streets, before they’re lost for good. (Remarkably similar to the Curbside Classic mission, now that I think about it.) I hope you’ll join me in this adventure: it’s finally time for me to open up my archives and share some of the finds with this wonderful community, as I’ve been meaning to do for years. There’s not much that we haven’t covered, but there are still some cracks to fill yet.
Photographed in Santa Monica, CA – October 2010 & August 2013
Related Reading:
Curbside Classic: 1987 Sterling 827 SL – A Living Legend by Brendan Saur
Curbside Classic: 1987 Sterling 825 SL – Turkey In The Grass by Paul Niedermeyer
Curbside Classic: 1996 Rover 800 – Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts by Roger Carr
Aww, this story put a smile on my face. I love that your “new journey” started with a Sterling. And how crazy it was that it was an 827 SLI with a stick! I literally had to Google the 800 to confirm it was even sold here in Australia (it was, unsuccessfully). I’ve certainly never seen one on the streets so it’d be a huge find for me, albeit without the fervent searching and anticipation. I do wish these had enjoyed a better reliability record as they have a terrific formula: take a classy Japanese sedan, give it a hatch and a warmer interior, and voila!
We all have our funny childhood quirks, by the way. In addition to my insatiable appetite for car magazines and spotting cars (I wish I’d had a camera when I was a kid!), I used to read street directories and draw maps.
Looking forward to more of your findings. SoCal is brimming with classics.
I owned a gorgeous red 827 SLI stick for 14 years and 180,000 miles, bought new. An entirely fabulous car, with a rosewood and Connelly leather interior. It was also inexpensive to maintain, as most Acura Legend mechanical parts fit perfectly, and a dealer in Texas acquired parts for a few cents on the dollar from all the other dealers when Sterling disappeared from the market, selling those parts very inexpensively. Service was available at any shop that could handle an Acura Legend. I miss it to this day.
What a gorgeous car, this was one of my favorites back then, the sedan yes but the fastback, Oh Baby! Shame about everything else to do with Sterling though and by the time the 827SLi came around the writing was on the wall…
From its Acura (Honda) Legend roots, it really is remarkable how different these two cars are inside and out. High hopes were had all around but a little too much was bitten off to chew, it appears. I wonder if this one is still around.
A shame both North America and Australia fairly narrowly missed out on the coupe. I understand the coupe was designed specifically with the US market in mind and it was handsome. By that point, however, the Legend was onto generation #2 while Rover was still making the 800 up until just after Legend generation #3 (the Acura RL) was being introduced.
This was the first real collaboration between the companies and they actually shared very little, about 20% of components.
The next (and last) spawned the Rover 200 (R8 model) and that was a world class car at the time, also a far better collaborative effort in sharing over 80%.
Yep, totally get that obsessive fascination of oblique subjects at 12 years-old thing.
You’ve made me look at this Sterling again; while it’s no Citroen CX it still has its appeal shape-wise albeit in a very 80s way. Sort of like a fully grown first-gen Honda CR-X.
This was a very good article as you had me wondering if you would ever find a Sterling despite seeing evidence you had. And don’t worry if a CC isn’t strictly focused on the car; it helps set context to the bigger picture. Besides, having nothing but factoids about the featured car can get tedious.
For your hobby you were lucky in two regards. First, your parents indulged you. Not everybody can say that. I remember a trip to Washington DC in 1989. I wanted to see the White House. My father drove by at 35 mph (back when the street was open) and then chastised me for actually wanting to stop because, hey, I had just seen it. We never did go back.
Second, you live in an area with a higher concentration of cars than some of us do combined with your area being bike-able. That’s a good combination for what you are after.
If you have pictures of 2,852 cars, please share them. Hoarding is such a bad habit. 🙂
I enjoyed journeying with you on your quest to find a Sterling logo. Like others here, I can relate to the automotive obsessions of a 12-year-old. For me it was car brochures and magazines, which I collected relentlessly as a kid. I still have most of them (except those that succumbed to the Great Parental Purges), and they form the foundation for many of my articles here. I never would have dreamed that I’d actually find them useful as an adult. And yes, I prize my Sterling brochures.
I’d love to find an 827 like this — a great car (in theory, at least), but completely and utterly doomed by the time it hit the showrooms.
You found a wild unicorn, for sure. I loved the Sterling, though I was just a kid when it came out. Its crisp styling and British luxury seemed very nice, though the Legend got an airbag while the Sterling got motorized belts. One of the magazines’ critiques of it a couple of years in included a statement along the lines of the British couldn’t even assemble a Honda correctly, but it does seem as though using Lucas instead of Nippondenso probably had a lot to do with that. The plastics inside also faded to uneven colors as I saw firsthand on a friend’s hand me down that he had when we were in HS. It was only about 5 at the time, but seemed much more rickety than most 5 year old cars. The leather still smelled nice, though.
This article reminds me of my youth and trustworthy, reliable Olympus XA2 camera, which served me well until 2000.
Every time my family travelled to Germany to visit our relatives and friends in the 1980s, I would take lot of photos of European vehicles not sold in the US or not available in certain trim levels. That included taking photos of American cars with export taillamps, a task my father chided me as one of the useless pursuits.
I had one of those too! For a while I tried to learn how to take pictures of cars in motion by panning the camera with the car. After not too long my father chided me about not wasting film… a phrase that’s unknown in the modern age.
That Olympus was a great camera, I took it everywhere.
Few people in the States were willing to spend top dollar for a car with automatic seat belts. You can’t put those in a car in that price range, with an interior like that. Honda should have never even permitted this car to be fitted out in them.
I would have never considered buying a car with those horrible things in them, at any price.
Well, those idiotic motorised shoulder belts didn’t stop the filthy rich men in the United States from hoarding up the Ferraris…including $400,000 ($880,000 adjusted) F40. See the photo below.
The worst one would be in Ferrari Mondial Convertible and 348.
The upper shoulder seat belt anchors are fixed to the rear firewall in the middle between the headrests and the lower anchors scurry along the bottom of door opening. Really irritating…for the women with skirts.
https://youtu.be/1-r5zArIp-U?t=373
ARCONA is stunning in how badly a mash-up between a British and Japanese manufacturer can go, particularly in how the NUMMI project between Toyota and GM turned out so well.
In fact, I wonder how much the Sterling failure went in depressing prices on the NUMMI cars even more. The NUMMI cars (Nova, Prizm, and, finally, Pontiac Vibe) were all terrific bargains since they were effectively cheap Toyotas. But the Sterling was most definitely ‘not’ a cheap Legend. It’s a real shame, too, since they otherwise seemed like very nice cars, particularly the feature hatchback.
You’ve got this all mashed up. ARCONA was not the manufacturer; just the NA distributor of the Rover 800 series with a new name for NA.
There is little or no correlation between NUMMI and Rover’s 800, as the NUMMI cars were 100% Toyotas built according to Toyota standards in a factory they ran, even if the joint venture was 50/50 owned by Toyota and GM. Its purpose was to show GM how to build cars the Toyota way.
Rover’s 800 was very different, in that it used the Honda platform and many mechanical parts, but it was substantially different otherwise from the Honda Legend. And many systems were designed and built by Rover, as was the whole car. It’s basically like Nissan and Renault sharing a platform and some parts, but the final car has significant differences.
The NUMMI Prizm was just a body variation of a JDM Corolla with a Geo badge on it. In other words, 100% Corolla.
(I wonder how much the Sterling failure went in depressing prices on the NUMMI cars even more.)
I never heard anyone suggest that before and I can’t follow that line of reasoning.
NUMMI made inexpensive Toyotas/Geos in California.
But the Sterling was a British car with a British name, and a dressed up Honda.
So NUMMI made good value inexpensive Toyotas.
But the Sterling was an overpriced expensive British Honda.
These brands showed up about the same time in the market, but they were very different in presentation, price, size and value.
I was a auto shopper back then, and I’m not the brightest bulb in the tool box, but I never considered a $7000 NUMMI vehicle and a $25,000 Sterling as similar.
While I agree that comparing NUMMI and Sterling is tenuous, I wouldn’t describe Sterling as an overpriced expensive Honda, unless you describe Acura in the same terms.
What? You mean Acura is not an overpriced Honda?
Thanks for sharing your obsession with us! I enjoy reading about youthful automotive obsessions, as I had a pretty strong one myself.
I must admit to having been smitten by the concept of the Sterling, too. Honda engineering and British accoutrements! American-marketed? How could that be anything but a winner?
Late to market, with British build quality? How could that be anything but a loser?
There was one in our family, too, belonging to an uncle who was a bank vice-president. I saw it when brand new and it fit his image. But he didn’t drive 450 miles to visit us more than once or twice a year, and I recall that I never saw the Sterling again.
Wow, this article really rang home with me too. I always looked for new and different cars as a kid, although my dad would have never indulged me with a camera to photograph them. Smart choice too as it would have cost him a mint. He did buy me car magazines though, which I memorized. A month between issues is a long time for a kid.
As for the Sterling… I was already working, driving an Acura Integra, and dreaming of a Legend when the Sterling appeared. I was fascinated as I leaned to the “How can you screw up a Honda, for Pete’s sake?” school….at first. However a business associate who worked in nearby Richmond leased one and whenever he came to visit on business I would get to ride it it. It was very nice, but there was always something weird (read electrical problems galore) going on with it. It was he who taught me the joys of leasing a nice, but bad car. He actually liked the Sterling (beautiful leather!) and since everything was covered under warranty, he just shrugged off the problems. At the end of the lease, he walked away whistling happily. I was a bit sad though, since I really, really, wanted the British car industry to recover and return to the U.S. and the Sterling made it very clear that was never going to happen.
“How can you screw up a Honda, for Pete’s sake?”
I suppose the next step would be going to museums and cataloging all the various badges and hood ornaments on classic cars? Might be fun.
Sterling’s finest moment in the US was the early TV ad showing a Sterling sedan on a mountain road with James Bond style music, and cutting to the interior where Patrick MacNee in full John Steed regalia said “I suppose you were expecting somebody else”.
I drove a new 827 hatchback on my favorite twisty roads once and it definitely delivered unfortunately the US dealer network and ads never successfully conveyed the idea that it was an Acura Legend with properly sporty handling, and BL never quite matched the donor Honda’s build quality. In the late 80s Japanese suspension tuning wasn’t as refined as their drivetrains so there was still some outside stuff like the Isuzu Impulse with Lotus suspension and in the case of Rover/Sterling an opportunity to make a better riding and handling Legend. That said the experience was diluted by both quality issues and the lackluster Austin-Rover 4 cylinder engines in lesser models. Fortunately the V6 in these was the Honda part and not the later KV6 of Freelander infamy
Thank you for this story. This really is CC at its best.
And I don’t know what’s the strangest oddity here. A boy hunting for badges, or a rebadged brit car pretending to be reliable.
Rover Vitesse : 100 mph Isle Of Man Lap
Provided this video is accessible for USA viewers, you might enjoy riding in-car with works rally driver Tony Pond, attacking the Isle of Man TT motorcycle road circuit in a very similar model, the Rover 800 Vitesse.
His first try averaged just under 100 mph, and in this film, the second time, they made 102 . Before viewing …. fasten your seat belt !
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31wxy3
You cant fault what a good one goes like, that lap is properly fast.
I had a peek at the pics of this Sterling when this article first posted early this morning.
My very first reaction is it looks like what a Saab/General Motors co-operative design might have looked like back in the late 80s. It has a touch of Saab 900 in the front part of the design. And a generic GM (global) feel in the rear profile. Even a bit of 80s Toyota in the profile.
I also found, with the steep rake of the rear window, the windshield needed a bit more rake. It’s not as upright as the Saab 900 windshield of course. But it would have looked sleeker if raked a touch further.
Great photos!
Great story….
Now, if you really want a snipe hunt, find an O.S.C.A. Unfortunately, only half the cars have logos, and it’s a sweet cloisonné emblem… but the car won’t be on the street…
He just has to wait for August to roll around and head up the coast to Laguna Seca for the Monterey Historics, there’s always at least a few OSCA’s running around the open pits for anyone to ogle.
Handsome car. I see SD1 lines in it. When my son used to collect car emblems, Sterling was an elusive one. We did eventually find one at a yard. Even with Maserati we found two Biturbos, and had to settle for the small steering wheel emblem because they were picked clean. Hunting for them was more fun than just buying them online. My favorite is a giant “International” from a ’50s flatbed. Must be two feet long and cleaned up well. It could be used as a weapon. The yard managers always let him pick what he wanted until the law changed and you had to be 16 to enter. So he waited 8 years and now, having just turned 16, decided it’d be fun to do it again and then they changed the age to 18. I doubt by then he’ll care. If I go to a yard for something, I try to pick up something interesting for him. I’m glad we treasure-hunted together when he was little. They’re only young once.
I was intrigued when these came out. It’s a good thing I wasn’t intrigued enough to buy one.
I grew up in the Kodak Instamatic with 12 shots to a roll of film era. If I had tried taking pictures of parked cars my thrifty mother would have thrown a fit.
Like it – the story and the car. I actually prefer the styling of series 1 800/Sterling hatch to the Rover SD1, even if it can’t match the appeal of the older car. Teh second series (not seen in NA) was not as elegant, IMHO.
My equivalent was not collecting badges but registrations. UK registrations have a date code embedded in them and from the early 1960s to the 1980s it was the letter at end, which rolled on 1 August each year. So, 1 August was a big day for the motor trade with private buyers keen to secure a clearly brand new car. Believe it or not, garages used to open in the early hours for deliveries and collection.
This coincided with the school and family holiday period so a big thing for the long long journeys from Yorkshire to Scotland or Devon would be to count the number of, say K registrations in 1971. Through the 1970s, my brother (our very own Big Paws) and I would count these and the first to 100 would feel entitled to a prize, even if he didn’t get one.
We now roll the date code twice a year and the effect is still there but much less marked.
When first introduced in 1963 those date codes (originally the suffix letter) ran for the calender year. The motor trade pushed for the Summer changeover to give mid-year sales a boost, but this ended up severely distorting new car registrations. The change was made in 1967 so the ‘E’ suffix only covers 1st January to 31st July for that year. Once they reached ‘Y’ they swapped it round to a prefix system.
Great story!
A co-worker had obtained a new
Sterling sedan back in ’88 or ’89 – if I remember correctly the car had some electrical gremlins under it’s hood. I don’t recall the handsome 5dr hachtback – one of my favorite body styles then & now.
I happen to be sitting on a 1991 827SLI silver bullet that was originally a Sterling executive car in Miami. The car does have some issues with it but does have every dealer Service manuals a bunch of other parts and the central locking diagnostic tool. I do not have a picture on my phone the car is in storage I am willing to sell for the right price.
Sterlingbuiltpools@icloud.com