Junkyard Find: Electric 1995 Geo Metro
Normally, I wouldn’t consider an 18-year-old Suzuki Cultus badged by a now-defunct GM marque to be worthy of inclusion in this series, but this particular example— which I found at my favorite Denver self-service wrecking yard— has been converted to electric power and is thus sort of interesting.
The valuable stuff that electric-car geeks like to keep (i.e., the electric motor, control circuitry, and batteries) is all gone, but you can see that this setup used the Suzuki front-drive transaxle more or less intact.
It looks like there was some sort of electrical fire or maybe a big acid spill in the rear of the car at some point, judging from the pried-open-in-a-hurry hatch and melted insulation.
You don’t see many 400-amp ammeters and 180-volt voltmeters in junked econoboxes!
Now that you can buy genuine factory-made electric cars, these homemade jobs don’t quite make the statement they once did. Still, the guy who built this car is probably driving a different electric machine. Let’s hope it’s an electron-driven Triumph Stag.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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back in my army days I was stationed in Germany on old M60 tanks that had 4 24 volt batteries under the floor. One day as we were tooling down the road they managed to catch fire. I couldn't tell they were burning as I was driving with my head outside the hatch when my TC told me to pull over. The last thing I heard in my headset before they all bailed out was "put out the fire". So I crawled out of the drivers hole and I couldn't see a thing, toxic smoke seemed to set my lungs on fire and my eyes too. I crawled out of the tank, handed the fire extinguisher to the sarge and told him he never taught me how to do this job and he needed to show me. Needless to say the rest of my day was spent on the s***list. This tale is a close second to another story entitled, "Never Light a Cigarette While Driving a Tank on the Autobahn."
When I was a young man in Joplin, Mo, sometime between 1994 and 1996, a guy converted one of these 2 door Metros to air power. The movie theatre I worked at was in a 50's era shopping center, and in the evenings after many of the stores and offices closed, the "inventor" would do test runs in the back parking lot. It had a compressed air tank mounted on the roof and you could see the two pistons working behind where the grill should have been. It had "Pneumatic Urban Commuter" painted on the side and he would literally fart around the parking lot at 20-30 mph.