We Promised You A SsangYong Rodius, And Now There Is One Outside My House And I’m Not Happy About It

“With everything that’s happened to you, you should be in an institution, prison or dead,” said my therapist in our most recent session. “I work at The Autopian. Pretty much the same thing,” was my reply. But wait Adrian, I thought you’d had found a happy home with a bunch of automotive misfits exactly on the same slightly out-of-tune wavelength as you. Don’t you like working there? I do. Or at least, I did.

I’ve always been a good Autopian soldier. I’ve been here since the beginning. What was that? Three, four, twenty-five years ago? You get less for murder. I always try and write fun things for your consumption that I would like to read myself. I’ve done last-minute rush pieces at ungodly hours of the night. Sometimes first thing in the morning, when my coffee and nicotine levels are less than optimal. Because of the time difference when I’m doomscrolling in the morning, I drop items in the Slack to give everyone else a head start. I shoot reels. I upload all my copy into the mainframe so all it needs is a once-over from an editor. I engage with the readers and I pop into the Discord. And I’ve only been nearly fired once (it was my own fault). What thanks do I get for all of this? Sniper fire from my own side. From outside the building, I don’t care, but when it’s your own people? That’s harder to take.

Et tu, new members?

A while back, Evil Matt, who despite his aw-shucks, baseball-loving outward demeanor, is actually a Terminator who gets Chartbeat metrics beamed directly into his brain, asked if I would be willing to help with a membership drive. More precisely, if we hit a certain number of new members and upgrades in June, could The Autopian buy me a SsangYong Rodius and make me drive it to meet the rest of the gang at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in mid-July? Like we did with David and the Aztek last year. Except he got a cool car and I would be getting lumbered with a shitty one.

A Rodius. This deal was getting worse and worse all the time. I pleaded with Matt. I offered alternatives that I thought might work. I found a very ropey Fiat 126. Imagine how miserable I would be driving four or five hours from my house down to the Duke of Richmond’s slightly bigger one in that thing. But no. Matt wouldn’t be bargained with. And he couldn’t be reasoned with. It had to be one of the ugliest cars ever created by possibly human hands. I logged off Slack and went and poured myself a stiff drink. An exceptionally large Rodius-sized one.

[Ed note: BTW, thank you members for helping us reach this goal. It was clearly all worth it. If you’d like to become a member, the more we get, the more ammo we have to encourage Adrian to do increasingly amusing things with the SsangYong, so you can become a member and use code SsangWrong for another day or so and get a discount. – MH]

A SsangYong What Now?

Before we get into how I ended up with an elephantine turd of an MPV outside my house, I should do a quick primer of what exactly the SsangYong Rodius is. Originally called Dong-A Motor (stop sniggering), the company was renamed after it was bought by the SsangYong Group in 1988. In 1991, they entered an engineering and technology relationship with Mercedes with the purpose of getting serious about building cars for the bottom of the ocean. The first fruit of this partnership of the damned was the FJ Musso, a big clattery body on frame SUV with Mercedes undergubbins for those parts of the world where you don’t go on holiday. But that was just the warmup act for the Rodius.

When the Rodius was introduced to a horrified world in 2004 the MPV market was still relevant. If this South Korean upstart was going to get noticed and attract customers from traditional OEMs or the ranks of the criminally insane, they were going to have to do something spectacular. And boy did they, but probably not in the way the bigwigs on the 498^th floor of SsangYong Towers expected. Flopping onto the market like a sea lion with wheels that had been hit by a giganto-ray, it had a weird roof line that looked like a canopy had been tacked on above the C pillar.

Struggling to get that enormous body down the road and out of the way of poor onlookers were a couple of old Mercedes motors: the 2.7 OM612 diesel inline five or the 3.2 M104 inline six petrol. Your transmission choices also hailed from Stuttgart: either a five-speed manual or the 5G-Tronic automatic. Inside, it came in 7, 9, and 11-seat versions depending on how many of your friends you wanted to upset. It wasn’t well received and consequently, it didn’t sell well. And now I had to try and find one.

I had warned Malicious Matt that we probably weren’t going to have a lot of choice, and due to the timescales involved and the fact I was going to be spending The Autopian’s money as opposed to mine (my own card issuer would refuse such an ugly purchase), buying from a dealer as opposed to mucking about on Facebook marketplace would be a prudent way to progress. Unfortunately, a search on Autotrader coughed up two prospects about sixty miles away from me in Peterborough. This was good and bad. Good because I could see both in one day. Bad because I would have to go to Peterborough, a sort of liminal place that appears on a map but no one really knows anything about.

The Dealer Was So Bad I Thought I Was Going To Be Axe Murdered

Our first candidate was a blue 2012 2.7 diesel S with a manual transmission priced at £2295. Now, this isn’t my first rodeo at the bottom of the car-buying market. Remember, I hail from East London, which is shady car dealership central. A closer inspection of the photos and reading some of the reviews of the place did nothing to quell my suspicions that this enterprise was not exactly on the up and up. When I arrived at the arranged time, what confronted me was what could only be described as Miss Mercedes’ Field of Dreams. A large expanse of overgrown and muddy wasteland festooned with abandoned and broken cars. There must have been two hundred of them, including a poor Smart ForFour. There was no office, no signage in fact no signs of any life at all. All that was missing from this tableau of automotive despair was a large, chained-up barking dog. Was this a car dealership or the set of The Last of Us? I had called the ‘proprietors’ twice and had been assured that someone was on the way – by this point, I had already been there half an hour past the meet-up time. I was getting ready to turn the Mini around, and then I spotted it – the Rodius of Hades himself.

With a large nettle growing out of the front bumper and a few dented panels, this thing was filthy. I mean NYC NV200 taxicab levels of baked-in, hard-earned grot, resistant to all known cleaners and solvents. I don’t think there was a straight panel on it. The cupholders were full of matches. The trunk piled high with random crap. What a heap. I decided to photograph both Rodius and the panorama for posterity anyway. If I should meet a grisly end here, the police could examine my phone and discover my last known whereabouts.

 

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And then a strong-looking outdoorsy type woman with a large axe in one hand and a hammer in the other appeared. This, I assured myself, was it. I might be 6’2”, but I weigh nothing and smoke for a living. Hacked to bits, body parts chucked in the back of a filthy, hideous MPV in service of The Autopian. I didn’t think I’d be the first one of us with that on their headstone.

“You alright there mate?” She cheerfully smiled. I bet they always smile before they bury the axe between your eyes.

“Err yes? I came to look at a car, but it’s not exactly what I was expecting.”

“No. Don’t bother. They’re a right pair,” Axe Lady explained.

What followed was a full description of a very shady operation. And Axe Lady turned out to be genuinely nice, explaining that these fly-by-night used car cowboys rented the land from her father. I thanked her externally for her help and internally for not killing me and gratefully scarpered in the only working car in the field, my Mini. The temptation to head to the nearest pub and get the train home was quite overwhelming. But I couldn’t because we needed a Rodius and only had one prospect left.

Worst. Gearchange. Ever.

This second one was priced at £3995, also hailed from 2012, and again was a 2.7 S diesel manual. A thankfully non-axe-murdering dealer soon turned up, and after he had extricated it from the back of the crowded lot and pumped up a flat tire, I soon found myself wishing I had a paper bag over my head as I took a test drive. First, what a boat. Second, what a boat. How could a car that heaved and pitched and rolled and indeed sounded like a fishing trawler have such an appalling ride? What reverse suspension witchcraft made such a combination possible?

The accelerator was just a pedal for making more noise or less noise. Any change in forward momentum was purely coincidental. The brakes, well, they were there eventually. The manual gearbox was, without question, the worst shifter I have ever used. And I used to own a Defender and have driven David’s J10 pickup. The movement of the gear lever made me feel like the operator in one of those old-timey railway signal boxes. You had absolutely no idea what gear you were in or where they were. I managed to alternately bog the motor and make it scream up to 3000 rpm.

Still, it was clean, everything appeared to work, and it presented well. Back in the dealer’s office, I explained our slightly unusual situation and how I would now have to consult with a higher authority on the best way to proceed. I had been instructed to try and get a deal (this is The Autopian, after all), but was informed that the price was the price, take it or leave it. (This Rodius, and less unsurprisingly, the blue one, are still for sale.)

I Am Altering The Deal. Pray I Do Not Alter It Any Further

Back home, Malicious Matt,  Traitorous Torchinsky, and I had a group call. It’s at this point that a new master villain enters the picture to make my life even more hellish: Dastardly David Tracy. I’ve said it before, don’t let the kittens fool you. He’s a tyrant. A tyrant with extremely tight purse strings and a terrible sense of aesthetics. He would wield these evil powers to devastating effect. Couldn’t we do better (worse)? Cheaper? More significantly, couldn’t we find a pre-facelift Rodius? The one with the mismatched grill shape, as opposed to the slightly less dubious chrome grill on the two cars I had looked at. Bloody hell. This would mean leaving the serene and safe (!) waters of Autotrader and pulling our knickers down in the fetid waters of Facebook Marketplace (we do have Craigslist, but I wasn’t going on there without a gun).

As only a man with a finely honed ability to sniff out a shitbox Jeep can, he immediately found one on UK Facebook marketplace. Before I could protest, Matt was already running the registration through the UK’s MOT checker website and confirming it had one. I couldn’t keep up with such treacherous tag teaming. David, not wanting to spend a penny more than was absolutely necessary, instructed me to ruin my life by getting on with it and messaging the seller.

And so, a few days later, I found myself taking a train journey to Telford and being met at the station by a lovely guy with a silver W140 Mercedes. Turns out he just likes buying old cars, fixing them up and using them for a bit, then punting them on. He’d taken the Rodius as a part-ex and just needed to get shot of it. I ran it around the limited confines of the trading estate where it was parked, and up to about twenty miles an hour, and discovered it drove as well as these things do. Slightly better in fact, because despite still being powered by a 2.7-liter fishing boat diesel (I suspect all the UK ones are – the gas mileage in the six would be ruinous here), this one was an auto. It looked a little filthy as it had been sitting under some foliage, but there were no big dents or rust, it didn’t smoke, and had been halfway to the moon at over 120,000 miles. Reluctantly accepting my fate and fearing for my Autopian career, I handed over £800 in crisp twenties.

It took me a few minutes to sort out the road tax and registration online (I had already organized temporary insurance), and then it suddenly hit me: I had no idea where the hell I was or how to get home. I managed to wedge my phone into the cupholder at an angle I could see it and hope the battery would last the three or so noisy hours the journey would take. There was a stereo, but it didn’t work, so no hope of drowning out the dieselly din. The air con blew warm. The windows were smeared with tree goo. I was in a wobbly, slow van with marginal brakes on roads I didn’t know. Wonderful. At least no one I knew would see me driving it.

How Bad Can It Be?

 

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So what’s the Rodius like? In a word, slow. For my own amusement, I put the box into sport mode and executed manual changes by moving the lever side to side (WTAF). It made no difference. The driving position is high and there is a lot of bus around you, which took me straight back to my courier days behind the wheel of a Mercedes (irony klaxon) Sprinter. You feel like you are guiding the blessed thing rather than driving it. It might have Mercedes wishbone front suspension and multilink rear, but to be honest, the wheels could be attached by bungee cords and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. You heave on the big steering wheel, giving it the proper van driver shoulder lean-in to get the ponderous lock on faster, lest you run out of road. If you think I’m exaggerating, the Rodius is 201” (5125mm) long, 76” (1915mm) wide, and 72” (1821mm) high. It is huge. You can see how 11 people would fit inside. And it weighs 5100lbs (2300kg). On the slightly odder side of the spec sheet, ours is a full-time four-wheel drive WITH A LOW RANGE.

The motor makes 162bhp and 252lb ft, which is not enough. All that weight and Mercedes engineering might lead you to believe the build quality is impeccable. Well, the day they taught build quality at the SsangYong R&D center, the Germans must have all been celebrating a job well done in the pub. Because it is appalling. The Rodius isn’t a Rodius at all. It’s more of a collection of Rodius-shaped parts all travelling in the same direction. Bumps absolutely crash through the whole structure to the extent that it feels like the thing is coming apart at the seams and then clattering back together. Loudly. With the racket coming from under the hood, I was beginning to think I might have to stop for Tylenol.

About three noisy hours later, I pulled up outside my house. I imagine my neighbors started getting alerts on their phones about their property prices dropping as I did. I saw cats hissing and I’m fairly sure the streetlights went temporarily dim. Parked up behind my faithful Mini, the size difference was astounding. It looked like if I left the Rodius too long, it would try and eat the poor thing. I immediately contacted The Autopian brain trust with the good (bad) news: The Autopian now possessed its very own SsangYong Rodius.

The only problem was, it was parked outside my house.