Junkyard Find: 1992 Geo Metro LSi Convertible
As a former Metro owner— about ten years ago, I found a low-mile ’96 Metro with four-cylinder and automatic for a scrap-value price and couldn’t say no to the deal— I’ve always sort of liked Suzuki’s little no-lux gas miserwagen. It takes a special Metro for me to include it in this series, however; we’ve seen this ’90 Metro El Camino, this electric-powered ’95 Metro, and this ’91 Suzuki Swift so far, plus this bonus Honda CBR1000-powered LeMons race-winning Metro, and now I’ve found one of the very rare Metro convertibles at a California self-service wrecking yard.
The early 1990s was a good period for cars, mostly; carburetors were finally gone forever, horsepower ratings were really starting to climb, the Japanese carmakers still hadn’t slid into their current take-no-chances boring design philosophy, and you could get cheap convertibles.
A three-cylinder, 1.0 liter engine coupled to an automatic transmission made for leisurely acceleration. Actually, it made for dangerously slow acceleration.
But so what? It was a convertible for dirt cheap!
You got what you paid for with the Metro, which is more than you could say for a lot of its contemporaries.
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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"A three-cylinder, 1.0 liter engine coupled to an automatic transmission made for leisurely acceleration. Actually, it made for dangerously slow acceleration." Wait til you experience the joy of going-nowhere-fast when the owner punched that A/C button on the dash.
I bought a '90 Metro convertible last year, a 5-speed with the 1.0 liter engine. The prices of Metros go way up when gasoline spikes, and plummet when fuel prices go back down. Still, it was a great buy for $700. It's not as fun as my Miata, or as exotic as the right-hand-drive Z, or as quiet as the Accord... but it's loads of fun to drive and accelerates just fine. Parts are cheap and it's very easy to work on. Getting almost a hundred miles out of two gallons of gas is part of the fun. And, seriously, if anyone doesn't like my car for whatever reason, that's their problem. Should people conform their choices in life to what might please some random stranger? Hell, no!