04 Jul 03 00:00
The Austin Maestro has been relaunched in China. After a somewhat tortured development process, Rover's sale of the tooling to a Bulgarian operation has finally seen the Maestro return to production - not in Bulgaria, but China. The Rover Group worked to set up Maestro assembly in Bulgaria after the car went out of production in the UK, but the project foundered - the Bulgarians were reportedly near-impossible to work with - and the tooling was sold on to a Chinese company called Etsong, which produced both the hatchback and the van. The project then passed to First Auto Works, which announced this revised version with the Montego nose to the Chinese press in May, according to the Austin Rover Resource website (www.austin-rover.co.uk). FAW has the tooling for the Maestro, as well as its sister the Montego and the van, which is how the company has come to produce this hybrid, the longer (slightly) sleeker nose of the Montego having been grafted onto the Maestro's five-door hatchback body. The Lubao CA6410, as it's called, is powered by an 86bhp 1342cc Toyota engine, but in most other respects it is as for the car that the Rover Group stopped making in 1994. All of which means that the alleged 'last Maestro' sold at last Sunday's British Motor Industry Heritage Trust auction for £7475 is not the last Maestro at all.
