User:Ianmax69/sandbox

In the National Lampoon's European Vacation (starring Chevy Chase) the hire car they see London in is a Yellow Austin Maxi which runs over Eric Idle and crashes into Ballard Berkeley 'The Major from Fawlty Towers' Lada, before later reversing into a fake Stonehenge and demolishing it!

In popular culture the Maxi clearly illustrates how Britian changed through the 1970's and demonstrated who British automotive design got left behind.. In the 1950's and 60's we were more practical and innovative, whoever through the 70's as a nation we became richer and became more aspirationalist, in this climate the Maxi lacked any of this, in an age when youthanisums started to flourish, the Maxi lacked any coolness. It was a highly innovate car for its time, and has been copied by so many other manufacturers globally since then. But even in the 1970's both motoring journalists and motor retail traders alike would often refered to it as "the great undesirable" and with the reputation of other BL products and strikes that plaged the country the phase, "British Leylands new car - Maximum Aggro" ran around the press. This sadly stuck and even today the Maxi can be a metaphore picked up by journalists and image makers alike to describe the worst of the 70's. In the 2010 General Election campaign, Labour used an add featuring David Cameron sitting on the bonnet of an Audi Quattro, with the slogan "Fire up the Quattro- Back to the 80's under the Tories" to which Conservative Party officials quickly photoshoped a poster together featuring litter, flares and Gordon Brown sitting on a Maxi trying to demonstrate Britain at its worst. It was in great irony after all this journalistic Maxi hate mail that in 2011 Top Gear ran a news feature on the website "howmanyleft.com" where James May quoted 'just to be serious for one moment,, there is one Austin Maxi Automatic left in the world' to which Richard Hammond quibed at the end "yere,, but its still crap!"