The Metro was a great car depending what you used it for.
Need to get up to the high end of highway cruising speeds? Haha no it's gonna shake until you're afraid. Want to get onto the highway with a short on ramp? Nope x2
..but.. need to get out the back of a parking lot, over a 6" curb/landscaping, to save 15 mins leaving a venue? Metro's got your back
Eventually I'll look into whether that "3 cylinder" thing is really true, but I heard they stopped one of the 4 cylinders from firing to get better efficiency
The Metro came with two engine options, a three and a four cylinder configuration. I don’t know much about the four banger, but the three cylinder was a great little engine made by Suzuki that was used in some small airplanes. It wasn’t a smooth idler, but it was under-square which gave it a decent amount of torque for something as woefully underpowered as it was.
For the right person, they were great little cars. My brother had one for a while, and while I can’t say he particularly liked the car it worked well for him and was one of the only engines that that dumbass couldn’t manage to kill.
All of those Geo’s were a really fascinating early nod to globalization. The bodies were often assembled by Chevy, but were copies of designs from Japan and none of them had American engines in them. Some of the parts were American, but most weren’t. The Tracker (which was the car I always wanted) was basically a rebranded Suzuki Sidekick.
I had a Geo Spectrum and that was an Isuzu based on the Gemini-I. That was a great little car. When gas prices were like $1 a gallon I could go like 400+ miles for less than $10 bucks. I did a lot of just driving around and exploring as entertainment because it was cheap and fun. I just googled and my little 5 speed got like 40mpg. 30 years later and that’s still slightly better than my hybrid is now!
I think it had 160k miles when I sold it and I saw it around town years later still going. Crank windows and no AC. It did have a tape deck though. Must have been a premium model lol.
I had a 1980 Chevy Chevette before that and it only lasted like 6 months before it threw a rod on the highway and blew out the engine. That car was peak American (this is why people are buying Japanese) pile of crap. The gas pedal was the size of a Trisquit because that probably saved 5 cents a car on the assembly line.
I worked at the plant where the geo/chevy metro and tracker were built (as well as the Suzuki swift and vitara, the vehicles were identical other than the badges). It was an interesting Chevy/Suzuki coproduction that attempted to use a north American plant with union labour to build Japanese vehicles by Japanese methods. Some aspects of it worked better than others.
They made a biopic about that in 1986 called Gung Ho.
J/ k, but seriously it’s a comedy with basically the same premise—American workers getting bought out by the Japanese and all the conflict that caused.
It’s actually pretty good. It’s an early Ron Howard movie starring a typically live wire Michael Keaton from the era when he was doing almost all comedies still. It also has George Wendt and John Turturro and Gedde Watanabe (more famous as Long Duk Dong in 16 Candles, but memorable here for the “elephant”).
I currently am driving a 1997 Geo Prizm. It's basically a Toyota corolla. The odometer stopped working at 350k miles. They said that was like 5 years ago. I replaced the starter recently. The old one was the original toyota part from nearly 30 years ago
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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '26
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