The Aston Martin Lagonda

TIME magazine infamously rated it as 'one of the worst 50 cars of all time', but the edgy, angular and electronically adventurous Aston Martin Lagonda that has sharply polarised the opinion of enthusiasts for more than 30 years today has a cult following that ensures its future as one of the most interesting collectable classics of the 1970s and '80s.

When it was introduced to a gob-smacked motoring world in 1976, the long and low William Towns-designed four-door sedan that revived the Lagonda brand name was intended to be the 'White Knight' to save its Aston Martin mother company from the receivers.

Aston Martin was cash-strapped at the time and urgently needed funds to develop new models and ensure its survival and the new Lagonda immediately drew hundreds of deposits from potential customers.

Towns' design that inspired this enthusiasm was a futuristic and extreme interpretation of the classic 1970s 'folded paper;' style and resulted in a two-tonne, alloy-panelled four seater that was as low as a Porsche, yet had the footprint of a limousine, with its four occupants seated in a club-like Connolly hide interior.

While its Aston Martin-sourced 5.3 litre DOHC V8 engine running on carburettors and its standard Chrysler three-speed automatic transmission were very much 1970s technology, the digital dashboard with its multitude of small LED readouts governing everything from engine revs and speed to battery voltage was straight from a scene from Dr Who. It was also failure-prone, delaying the arrival of the Lagonda to market by almost 12 months and reportedly cost four times as much to develop as the budget for the entire car.

The dashboard on the second series cars used cathode ray tubes for the instruments, but they proved even less reliable than the original LEDs and owning a Lagonda meant being on first-name terms with your Aston Martin service centre or a patient auto electrician.

Other early Aston Martin Lagonda oddities were fixed rear door glass, a non-opening 'moon roof' and a mechanical odometer located under its forward hinged bonnet.

During its 13-year lifespan, the Lagonda was produced in several 'series' and held the dubious reputation as being one of the world's most expensive cars. In Australia it sold for around $250,000 in the late 1970s - considerably more than its closest market rivals, the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit/Silver Spur, Bentley Mulsanne, and Maserati Quattroporte.

The cost can partially be explained by the snail's pace production line, with just three cars a week leaving the Newport Pagnell works, with a total production from 1976-1989 of 645 vehicles.

Only a proportion of these survive today, as many were sold to oil-rich Arab sheiks who quickly abandoned them in favour of new toys when they were sidelined with electric problems.

However a number of the cars came to Australia, with one-time Aston Martin agent Bob Jane currently having two to his name on the International AML directory, while a further 15 cars are scattered throughout New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and even the Northern Territory.

Around the world, most surviving cars are not surprisingly found in the United States - their largest export market - followed by the UK and Germany. However AMLs have found their way to such far-flung places as Brunei (3), the Congo (1), Greece (1), Iran (1), Jordan (1), Lithuania (1), Malaysia (1), Morocco (2), New Zealand (1), Nigeria (1), Russia (1), Turkey (1) and Zimbabwe. And no, Mr Khalfan in Harare is shown as the current owner of that country's only AML, not Robert Mugabe!

'Demoralise thy neighbour' was the advertising line used by Aston Martin Lagonda in its campaign to sell the AML into the United States by the time the first cars arrived there in the early 1980s.

'Fascinate thy neighbour' would be an equally true statement in today's classic car circles for this amazing vehicle from another era.