Rare Rides: A 2000 Chevrolet Metro, Which is New
Today’s Rare Ride will upset some of you. It’s one of those cars that was very common in its day, entirely disposable, and a prime example of the characterless econobox. Yet because it was such a throwaway, nobody ever saved one – except this one.
Visiting us from 21 years ago, it’s a Chevy Metro with 400 miles.
GM introduced its second-generation Metro for the 1995 model year, a rounded and more modern vehicle than the first Geo Metro on offer from 1989 through 1994. The new Metro was again based on the GM M platform, which was really old by the mid-Nineties. M was a slight update to the 1983 Suzuki Cultus platform, and GM used it on various Suzuki, Chevrolet, Holden, and Subaru vehicles around the globe. Like a cockroach, M refused to die and was in production through 2016 as the Suzuki Cultus for the Pakistan market.
But back to the M Metro. Available as a three-door hatchback or derpy four-door sedan with a nice rear-wheel-arch, the Metro was built in Ingersoll, Ontario at GM’s CAMI Assembly. Speaking of which, Canadians experienced the Metro as the Pontiac Firefly while other markets saw it as the Suzuki Swift. North America itself received a new Suzuki Swift, but only as a lowly three-door between 1995 and 2000. Under Metro’s hood was one of three very small engines: A 1.0-liter inline-three, or two different versions of the same 1.3-liter inline-four. Transmissions were five-speed if manual or just three if automatic. The 1.0 used throttle body injection, made 50 horsepower and was available through 2000. It was the last vehicle on sale in North America with TBI. The other two engines offered fuel injection and produced 72 and 79 horsepower, respectively.
The Metro received a new lease on life in 1998, as GM killed off Geo and introduced a Metro wearing a fancy new bowtie. The branding update accompanied revised front and rear clips, and the arrival of an updated SOHC version of the 1.3 engine with 16 valves. That was the last notable update to Metro through its final year in 2001, where only a sedan was available and only in the LSi trim (I4 powered). Metro was eventually succeeded by the recently departed and Daewoo-developed Aveo.
Today’s Rare Ride is for sale on BaT, a website which attracts sensible people who pay reasonable prices for used cars. It’s a three-door in the bare-bones 1.0-liter specification. Over the last 21 years, it’s had one owner and has traveled exactly 402 miles. It has one (recent) service record at a local Chevrolet dealer. Pretty much everything on the Metro is manual, but it does have air conditioning. At the time of writing, there are six days left in the auction, and the Metro’s been bid to a shocking $10,989. We live in Bizarro World.
[Images: YouTube]
Interested in lots of cars and their various historical contexts. Started writing articles for TTAC in late 2016, when my first posts were QOTDs. From there I started a few new series like Rare Rides, Buy/Drive/Burn, Abandoned History, and most recently Rare Rides Icons. Operating from a home base in Cincinnati, Ohio, a relative auto journalist dead zone. Many of my articles are prompted by something I'll see on social media that sparks my interest and causes me to research. Finding articles and information from the early days of the internet and beyond that covers the little details lost to time: trim packages, color and wheel choices, interior fabrics. Beyond those, I'm fascinated by automotive industry experiments, both failures and successes. Lately I've taken an interest in AI, and generating "what if" type images for car models long dead. Reincarnating a modern Toyota Paseo, Lincoln Mark IX, or Isuzu Trooper through a text prompt is fun. Fun to post them on Twitter too, and watch people overreact. To that end, the social media I use most is Twitter, @CoreyLewis86. I also contribute pieces for Forbes Wheels and Forbes Home.
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I can’t believe someone would have spirited THIS away like so many GNXs! But stranger things have happened I suppose!
Thinking about these little ratbags, I have a sort of sneaking respect for them. They worked and they lasted. Nobody got shafted with a crap product that was unreliable. But then GM turfed out Suzuki for some unknown reason unrelated to logic or business, and offered the Chevy Aveo made by the incompetent Daewoo company instead of the Geo Metro. It was superior in only one way -- survivability if you ran it into a brick wall while it was still working. If a brand new 2002 Aveo, complete with frangible ohc drive and tippy suspension, came on the market today, the real question would be -- how much the owner should have pay to have it taken off their hands. The Aveo was crap personified. Just google "chevy aveo bag of s**t" and stand back for the invective. Changing "chevy aveo" to "geo metro" in the search term gets you nothing pertinent to the car itself. Biiiig difference.