After the excruciating embarrassment of the Allegro, things could not get any worse for British Leyland.

But that did not stop bosses continuing to confound motoring sensibilities with models that would never have made the drawing board in the design houses of our Continental cousins.

The Austin Maestro was a prime example. When it was first conceived in 1979, it didn’t seem a bad idea. But with all the internal wranglings at BL and the painful flirtation with the Japanese, it took three years before the Maestro saw the light of day by which time it already looked about as modern as a disco diva at a punk gig.

Even four months before production, attempts were made to scupper it but failed, mainly because bosses knew the Thatcher Government was sick of finding money down the back of the sofa to prop up the geriatric remnants of its car industry.

So the Maestro survived and became the first car at Cowley to be designed by computers and built with the help of robots.

The hi-tech theme continued with the use of a voice synthesizer system featuring actress Nicolette McKenzie, star of TV’s General Hospital, reminding drivers to top up their fluid levels and change a bulb. While this was a novelty for about 30 seconds, people then grew tired of Nicolette telling them what to do and yet again BL became the butt of comedians’ jokes until it quickly removed the system along with its digital instruments which owed more to Blake’s Seven than modern motoring design.

Of more concern were the leaking windscreens, plastic bumpers that peeled paint and shattered if so much as tapped in cold weather and a vacuum gauge with a sealing fault that emitted a loud flatulent noise at regular intervals.

But bizarrely people liked them and for a while they sold reasonably, although the 1980s buying public were not so misguidedly loyal to their British cars as the previous generation. However, the Maestro (particularly the MG version) was a favourite for joyriders, presumably because it was easy to nick.

Eventually the Maestro met its demise in 1992.