MG Sports Cars

There is a MG RV8 (left hand drive ) for sale on Ebay Motors ,item 320199558005. Its in England for sale ,but nothing to do with me. It must be a conversion,as far as I am aware MG only built 2 LHD and they are accounted for.

Interesting car. See how it has Rover badges on the front wings? Doesn't that indicate that this one was originally sold into the Japanese market? I read once that the Rover fender/side badges weren't installed on home-market RV8s.

The problem with this car is that it's tricky to register it in either US or Canada. (It's not old enough yet.) Apparently there are ways around the import restrictions - as there are at least three or four RV8s driving around here already. We've featured Scott Miller's home-built RV8 in the newsletter already [www.britishv8.org] but it's a special case.

Tom Raddatz' RV8 came here from the Caymen Islands and was rebuilt after extensive flood damage. We plan to feature it in the Spring issue of the Newsletter... I've recieved a rough-draft article on its story - now I'm just waiting on better photos to go with the text.

We also hope to include a special feature story on an RV8 race car owned by John Yea of British Motor Heritage. I suppose if you just wanted an RV8 for track or car show use, importation would be easy, wouldn't it?

I spotted that car a couple of days ago and started a thread on the MG Experience site about it:

[www.mgexperience.net]

Interesting bit of reading the seller wrote about the car. $10K conversion to LHD. I believe you are correct, Curtis, about the Rover tags. The bidding is up over $23K now. All I can find out about importing into Canada is any car over 15 years is exempt from safety standards at the time of manufacture. Something tells me it isn't quite that easy though to bring one in.

I'd love to get an RV8 but prices are still up there.

In actual fact if you are prepared to drive Right hand drive they are dropping in price, I have seen Rv8 ,s for sale over here for £10,000 ,I would think a container would cost £ 1000 ,so its not that expensive ( give it 2 or 3 month when the dollar/pound gets back to where it was)

Curtis
Dont think its an ex Jap car,they drive on the same side of the road as we do.

I have just looked again on Ebay,it is definitely an export model( Japan ) as it has air con,the Uk market had spotlights in the front valance,where as the export ones had air intakes in the spotlight "holes"

"This is a superb brand new $10,000 conversion to left hand drive using new dash and door cappings from original factory patterns by original manufacturer for the factory".

This quote from the ad. Very impressive conversion. Bidding has ended with reserve not met. Last bid: $25,100.

I've been kicking around the idea of looking into shipping an RV8 into Canada. It appears cars older than 15 years are exempt from the usual safety requirements.

It's been relisted with a starting bid of $30k! (320201685305)

Works out to be £15k, which is the price of an immaculate car in the UK RHD. Prices aren't really falling in the UK it's just they aren't selling, with petrol being so expensive ($7.40/Gallon) there is a limited market for V8 engined cars at the moment. If you buy a cheap one you'll need to budget in a fair amount of cash to bring it up to scratch.

We looked at 6 RV8's before we bought ours and they were all nothing like the adverts described them (screen surrounds, trim missing, door caps and dash cracking, rusty UK cars). Plenty of Jap imports have been clocked, not too hard to spot though.

All that said, buy one! Even if it's just to look at...

Paul
Where did you get yours , was it from a dealer or privately ?,next year when we have moved I intend selling the wifes Merc SLK and look for a good Jap RV8 which will get used more,the SLK has done 3000 miles in 4 years.

Ended up buying from a Jap importer in the end. Car itself is immaculate but it needed door cappings so we managed to get a good deal on it. Clive wheatley then refurbed them for us.

Only thing with the RV8 is that it'll want a garage and not using in the wet, it won't last as well as the SLK..

So you guys are saying that the Jap RV8's are the better car than the home-market ones? If so, why?

Paul, what happens in the rain? Do they have a tendency to leak like the original B's?

Simon
They main differance between Jap and UK home market cars is the Jap ones have air con ,the "works" of the air con being down the passangers footwell. You can tell the differance between the two cars when you look at them head on, a Uk market car has spotlights in the front spoiler whereas a Jap one has air intakes for the air con in the holes where the lights would go.

In my experience i've noticed several differences between the UK and Jap cars condition wise.

The jap cars are more likely to have dings or small dents but I've yet to see rust on bodywork..

UK cars tend to have been cherished, if they haven't you will notice right away. Only risk is if they have been used on UK roads in the winter, salt destroys the RV8 so quickly it's unreal. Treat it like an MGB and give it some rust waxing when you buy it.

As mentioned Jap cars will have Aircon, it's actually pretty good, most seem to work but it really needs to be run frequently. UK car has front fogs, Jap have cooling ducts in place of Fogs.

Jap cars have the Vacuum advance in the wrong place, it runs from the wrong side of the throttle butterfly so it should be moved over, takes about 5 mins to swap over, then timing needs resetting.

Jap cars suffer with sun damaged wood veneer, it can be replaced or relaquered but it's not cheap so bare in mind when haggling. Make sure toolkit etc is present as they are expensive, as is a spare wheel (some people remove them for boot space).

Obviously windscreen surround is a major price point, they're prone to rust so make sure it's a good one, they all rust inside but some worse than others. I've packed ours with wax.

As for parking it out in the rain they do leak a little, not as bad as an MGB round the windows but they're not water tight... I'd garage it for sake of rust prevention and keeping it clean..








Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2007 12:24PM by PaulV8.

This is all VERY interesting!

Guys, I really want and need your help with putting together an article or two about the RV8 model... I have in mind a big collection of close-up photos plus captions to point out technical and feature differences from the original MGB, plus what things to look for when buying an RV8. There have been lots of magazine articles on RV8 over the years, but most of them are pretty shallow. I've already collected a couple nice photos of a bare RV8 bodyshell to include, and I know where to get more. We have the storage space and bandwidth on this website to display thousands more photos. (Info on how to submit photos, etc., is here: [www.britishv8.org])

As a reference, check out the recently added "factory" MGB GT V8 model cars in our photo gallery:
(Dave Wellings' car) [www.britishv8.org]
(Kevin Richards' car) [www.britishv8.org]
(Nigel's car) [www.britishv8.org]

Thanks for the info, gents. I read on an RV8 site about the vacuum advance being in the wrong place. Was this something done for Japanese emissions? Seems odd that most (or all) of these cars had this issue. Good point about keeping the cars garaged. I had a '74 that had to sit outside because of two other MGB's in the garage and it did suffer. Gone to a new home now.