Rover Rover 8 History

The Rover Company, founded in 1878 by John Kemp Starley and William Sutton and famous for the 1885 Rover Safety Bicycle, entered car manufacturing in 1904. Its first model was the Rover 8, a single-cylinder light car designed by Edmund Lewis, who had come from the Daimler Company.

The little Eight established Rover as a carmaker and remained in production into the early 1910s, by which time Rover had moved on to larger multi-cylinder models. (A later, unrelated 'Rover Eight' flat-twin appeared in the 1920s.)