In the week that BMW's Cowley plant celebrates the fifth birthday of the new Mini, another car built at the factory makes its return to the market.

The last Maestro to roll off the production line is up for sale on eBay with only 36 miles on the clock. It will go on sale in the third week in July.

When the car, a 2.0l turbo diesel Clubman, registration number M439 NOA, rolled off the production line in December 1994, it had a price tag of £13,000.

Nowadays, that money would buy a brand new Mini One and still leave change for extras. A basic Mini One costs £10,995.

Dickie Langton, owner of a Maestro for 15 years, said: "It was a good and reliable car but the bodywork was poor. Cowley-built cars have definitely gone down in price and up in quality since those days."

The Maestro now going on sale was taken straight from Cowley to the British Motoring Heritage Trust in Gaydon. The 36 miles it has travelled were clocked up when it was taken to a garage for its MOT.

The trust had both the last and the first Maestro (built in 1983) in its collection until 2003 when M439 NOA was sold to a private buyer.

The sale followed a review of cars in the collection that were not on public display. It is that buyer, whose identity is unknown, who is now putting the car on eBay.

The new Mini, based on the original design of the old Mini by Alec Isigonis, first went on sale on Saturday July 7, 2001.

Since then BMW has hailed the car as the runaway success of the decade, with more than 800,000 sold in over 70 markets around the globe.

The Oxford factory now produces six models: Mini One, Mini Cooper, Mini Cooper S (all with convertible versions available).

Last year a record 44,770 were sold in the UK, the car's largest market, with USA and Germany taking second and third places.

Managing director of BMW Plant Oxford Dr Anton Heiss said: "The £100m investment programme currently under way will allow us to increase production flexibility and capacity further and meet the growing worldwide demand for Mini."

The first new Mini built at Cowley in April 2001 was shipped to BMW's own museum in Munich.

By the end of 2007 BMW will increase the jobs at its Oxford plant by 200 to 4,700. In 1994 when the last Maestro was built, the plant employed about 13,000 people.