The French are great believers in the expression vive la difference. And when it comes to cars, they have produced some fantastique examples of just how different they can be, from the fabulously futuristic Citroen DS to the bizarre Renault Avantime.

Plain old saloon cars are not for them. At least that was until the Talbot Tagora came along, which had British motoring journalists scrabbling for the French dictionaries to look up the word for ‘boring’.

Originally designed by Chrysler to replace the disastrous 180 series, by 1979 the car, codenamed C9, found itself under the ownership of Peugeot, who had snapped up the Yanks’ ailing European division in exchange for a handful of centimes and half a pack of Gitanes.

Peugeot didn’t want the car – why would it when it already had the 604 as well as the Citroen CX in its stable? It was potentially worse than British Leyland building the Allegro, Maxi and Marina at the same time, and look what happened to them...

But it was too late – the C9 was too far down the line to be canned. So Peugeot stuck on a few extra bits from its parts bin along with its ubiquitous 2.7 litre engine, called it a Talbot Tagora, and shoved its foster child out the door.

The main problem with the Tagora was that the fact Peugeot didn’t really care showed immediately.

The car was bland in the extreme and the interior was more like something you would find in a basic hatchback rather than an upmarket saloon.

The UK advertising campaign proclaimed it brought “luxury and performance redefined”. If that definition was cheap and nasty then we were all sitting comfortably.

The trouble was that it was launched into a marketplace containing not only its stablemates, but the market-leading Ford Granada as well as contemporary offerings from BMW, Volvo and the old enemy, Renault.

There was just too much choice for buyers. Even the name Talbot meant nothing to most people and they ignored the Tagora.

A car this dull was doomed. To save any further embarrassment, within two years production was cancelled with fewer than 20,000 models built.

Peugeot concentrated on being more interesting and sticking to its own models rather than inventing new ones.