Austin Maestro

The Austin Maestro is a small family car which was produced in Oxford, England, from November 1982 to December 1994. There are two body styles, a five-door hatchback and a two-door van. It was introduced by British Leyland (BL) under the Austin marque, with the Rover Group (BL's successor from 1986 onwards) selling it simply as the Maestro starting from 1988. An MG-branded performance version was sold as the MG Maestro from 1983 until 1991. The Maestro replaced the Austin Maxi and Austin Allegro, with the van version replacing the corresponding van derivative of the Morris Ital. Although later year models were sometimes informally referred to as the Rover Maestro, the car never wore the Rover badge. The Austin Montego saloon was a variant of the Maestro. The Maestro was produced over a period of twelve years, with little change to its basic design, at Morris' former Oxford plant in Cowley, with 605,000 units sold in total. After production in the UK ended, knock-down kits were assembled in Varna, Bulgaria, from 1995 to 1996 under the Rodacar joint venture. Various derivatives were also made in China from 1998 to 2017.