Leave it to the Brits to floppify anything even remotely identifiable as
a Honda product. The Sterling brand was created as a way for the
much-maligned Austin Rover Group to reenter the American market, and on
paper, it made sense: Take a Rover 800—which was really just a rebodied
Acura Legend—rebadge it, and sell it through a network of independent
dealers under a new, made-up brand. The hope was that such a plan would
keep people from making any connection to the last U.S.-market
Rover, a horrible little turd blossom called the SD1. Japanese
reliability, British interior ambience, and a lack of preconceived
notions? How could you lose?
Quite easily, as it turned out. Predictably, the problem lay in the car
itself—the first Sterlings were nothing short of unreliable, hastily
screwed-together nightmares. (Apparently, Japanese engineering doesn’t
work if you assemble it with equal parts wood glue and indifference. Who
knew?) When build quality improved a few years later, it was a case of
too little, too late. Rover left America for the third time in 20 years
in 1991, muttering something along the lines of, “it’s not you, it’s
me.” America listened to its friends and didn’t call Rover back.
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-greatest-automotive-flops-of-the-last-25-years
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