#HondaLegend

Today’s Rare Ride hails from beyond the normal reaches of even astute car enthusiasts’ knowledge base. It was the brainchild of some British executives who were convinced there was a market for the classic London Taxi in the United States. In addition to standard taxis, the company offered one that was thoroughly luxed and broughamed.

I’m just not sure.

Though we wrote about the Sterling brand in a previous QOTD post from earlier this year, we’ve never covered one as a Rare Ride. It’s not often one finds a Sterling for sale these days, as most examples fell into disrepair and disuse by the late 1990s. But B&B commenter FreedMike managed to find a very tidy Sterling for sale at a dealer in Wisconsin, which is near Canada.

Come have a look at the not-quite Honda from Blighty.

A few days ago, Jalopnik posted a link to a classified site in Colombia that listed a bunch of armored cars for sale. These aren’t the MRAPs patroling the streets of Ferguson either. Hell, they’re even more discreet than the typical black Suburbans you see roaming around D.C.

N.B. In anticipation of Saab’s (inevitable) demise, we’re going to have Dead Brands Week at CC.

We’ll start off Dead Brands Week with a royal Rover triple bang, with this Sterling zombie corpse. When it comes to persistence (idiocy) in trying to flog dead corpses in the US, Rover absolutely takes the cake. It took three US deaths to finally convince Britain’s favorite maker of cars (and its government medium-wigs) to give up the ghost. The last attempt, Sterling, is the classic English car disaster story. Despite Rover’s intentions to avoid the usual pitfalls, by building an essentially reskinned Honda/Acura Legend, they still managed to create the ultimate rolling clap-trap English nightmare.