Austin mini Metro mk1: Review and Drive

welcome back to morsels and motors i'm shaun and today i'm really excited to be here to do a full video review walk around drive of this which is my 1983 austin metro and the reason i'm really excited is because i've had it several months and i have just finished recommissioning it i have changed a huge amount of things on it most mechanical components and service parts have been changed and it's finally finally on the road so this is a 1983 metro which is the third model year that the model was produced it's a mark 1 which means that it's got the original dashboard and the original front that the metro should have and also these original wheels as well the trim level is a confusing one it is described in the brochure as standard when the metro was launched uh in october 1980 there was the base metro and then an l and then various other models hle hls that kind of thing in 1982 they introduced a sub base called the city where they stripped out the base metro uh of things like passenger sun visor parcel shelf pretty much anything that made it a comfortable car and they introduced that as a under price undercutting sub base so that it competed directly with the fiesta popular on price so as one of the lowly low models of mark 1 metro we get the recessed headlamps and with the uh indicators and side lights in the bumper which uh i'm sure metro aficionados will know that the bumper is actually exactly the same front and rear there fog lights in the rear and there the indicators and side lights in the front to differentiate your standard metro from your city in 1983 you've got a silver coach line on the side or actually the coach line color vary depending on the body color of the car and this car is eclipse blue which is a really really dark kind of midnight blue and it's really hard to photograph it looks black in a lot of photos so i'm often having to put filters on photos to actually make it look more like the color it actually is as you might notice if you're an aficionado or if you've watched my previous video on this car you'll see that it does actually have a few extras over what a standard metro should have so it's got a passenger door mirror it's got a passenger side fog light on the rear bumper and it's also got a rear windscreen wiper all of these would have been optional extras so under the tiny little bonnet we've got a tiny little engine it is a 998 cc a plus british leyland engine it harks back originally to the a series which has been used in a myriad of british cars all the way from the 50s so let's have a look inside this beast so inside you'll see that we've got cloth trim in a very attractive blue the trim is called a marl cloth trim and that is a differentiation from the city so some of the things this car has over and above the city is a reversing lamp a heated rear window a choke warning lamp a parcel shelf a passenger sun visor front arm rests on the doors and rigid storage pins although as you might be able to tell i don't actually have the front arm rests so i've been shortchanged there on my standard hey-ho so let's give you a proper little tour of the inside of this metro starting with the door which is an incredibly basic vinyl door card an incredibly basic uh door pull which looks suspiciously like the sort of grab handle that should be on the ceiling of a car inside a very useful door pocket which is an extra over the city which is populated with some 2020 accessories like mask and hand sanitizer manual window winder and a manual door mirror you stick your hand out and adjust it i think that little blanking plate is possibly if it was a remote adjustable one but we're so low down the spec level that's just not going to happen here so moving on to the fascia itself this uh thin rimmed steering wheel is one of the changes that was uh made to the metro for 1983 the earlier metro's all had slightly chunkier four spoke steering wheels but the base models the city the standard got downgraded to this uh much more old-fashioned thin rimmed british layland steering wheel that i recognize from many other cars down to the right of the steering wheel is a bank of switches so we've got uh the rear wiper then we've got a blanking plate where the front fog light switch would be if it had them then rear fog lights hazard lights and heated rear window the instrument cluster itself is a model of both simplicity and blanking plateage so we've got a speedometer on the right going to a very ambitious 110 miles per hour and you can see the mileage is 44 074 in the bottom in the middle we've got a bank of warning lights um missing in the very center is the seat belt warning light which would have been there on earlier metros but by 1983 british layland decided as a cost-cutting measure that if you have your seat belt on you kind of know it and if you don't you also know it so you don't need a warning light okay then on the left we've got a fuel gauge and temperature gauge the reason the uh gear display is there uh is if this was a higher up model we would have either a clock or a rev counter where those uh fuel and temperature gauges would be and the fuel and temperature would be where the gearbox marker is and down here on the column steering column we've got the lights so this is a very faded button i'm afraid but it's got two settings that setting in the middle is for side lights and that one there is for full headlamps there is absolutely no indication on the dashboard as to whether your lights are on so it is definitely one of those cars that you can very easily leave with the lights on and drain the battery so i'll definitely switch that off on the left we've got the lights for dipped beam and main beam we've got the indicators and we've got the horn on the right we've got the wipers so we've got a front wiper i should say so we've got two speed wipers no uh intermittent uh and the end switch there is the wash wipe or should i say just the wash you've got to actually operate the switch to wipe the window yourself moving down to the center console we've got uh the choke there which has got the traditional british layland kind of twisted to lock it actually a little while to get used to that never operated that before and we've got the heater controls down here so this button controls the speed of the fan one and two this one controls whether these are open or not so closed at the top and open at the bottom i don't want too much air so it's about there then we've got uh hot and cold on a slider and then we've got where you want your air to be directed so we've got off not being directed anywhere i think windscreen and floor down here we've got a blanking plate where the cigarette lighter would be if it was posh enough to have one uh and then we've got a push button austin rover or british leyland longwave medium wave radio which works really well up on the rest of the dashboard we've got a ashtray there and i've also got this is just a prop just a packet of very 80 cigarettes i definitely don't smoke but i thought it would be a nice touch for the car that's the speaker for the radio just up there and then we've got a very large shelf which you can store a myriad of items below the shelf we've got some carpet where the glove box would be if it was posh enough to have a glove box but it's a standard so you know poverty you don't get a glove box sorry about that over on the passenger door is pretty much the same story as the driver's door uh a very vinyly basic door card and we've got the service book and manual and that sort of thing here which is pretty cool one of my favorite things about this little manual is that it's got a clear window in the back uh which opens onto the the data that you might need on the four court like what type of petrol it takes and uh the tire pressures which is a really neat idea i like that a lot down on the floor of the metro we've got our four-speed gearbox then we've got a manually operated handbrake which has got a sort of textured rubbery plastic handle which is actually quite nice to use um if you went for a posher metro i think it had a hand grip shape but really it's this is perfectly fine we've also got these wonderful original mini metro unipart floor mats on all four floor areas which is really nice one of my favorite things about metros is how cheap the interior is in some respects so you've got this body colored bar running across the floor to hook the seats onto which kind of looks a bit cheap really i think they haven't bothered to cover it with some carpet the carpet by the way is actually quite nice it's sort of a corduroy style material it's actually relatively it's relatively thick and it's very stiff it's very hard it's not soft at all lurking up at the roof we have got a driver sun visor which does grown a little then we've got the rear view mirror which does not have a dim dip function because basic and we've got a passenger sun visor which is above the city hooray aren't we luxurious and we've got a courtesy lamp looking over to the back of the metro you'll notice the very conspicuous absence of headrests we get these lovely blanking plugs instead because if you're in a basic car you don't need whiplash saving headrests you don't deserve them there's also no rear seat belts at all so yes you're going to be wildly unrestrained in the back in fact there isn't even any grab handles so there's really nothing to hold on to at all if you're traveling in the back looking more closely at the accommodation the rear passengers have um they've got these door cards which match very much the the front door cards but there again it's an example of bl being incredibly mean because higher up models have got that door card molded into a armrest so there's clearly space behind it to have uh you know a cut out for your arm but no for your base and uh city models you don't get that you just get a piece of card covered in vinyl however you do get the luxury of not only one ashtray on that side but another one on this one and i love how these little things operate i remember them just like this in my grandmother's mark one fiesta they just pop out like that so let's take the seat forward and have a little sit in the back now one of the things that everybody says about the metro it was in the original sales brochures and in the press at the time when it was launched is how spacious the metro is and that's absolutely true it's a tiny car from the outside teeny tiny but inside it does not feel like a tiny car you've got loads of space a lot of it has got to do with the deep glass area there's just quite a lot of glass going on also the dashboard as you'll have seen is kind of sculpted away from the driver and passenger so it kind of goes into the engine bay almost which gives it a much greater sense of spaciousness in the back here i'm actually i would be comfortable i'm about five foot seven um so i'm not the largest person in the world but i've got tons of headroom i've got decent leg room my legs are right up against the seat to be the most comfortable that they could be um seats in my driving position i can imagine if it was a taller driver needing the seat back that i'd end up being a bit kind of like this in the back or straddling the seat like this um so i'd only want to be here for short journeys the reason it feels spacious in the back here though is because of the angle of this rear seat it's really sharp and this bottom of the seat it's kind of like that shape there so your kind of your bottom is being shoved into the back corner like that so you're really being forced into the seat taking up as little lateral space as possible it's a great piece of design may not be the most comfortable but a great piece of design nonetheless inside the boot is not too shabby in terms of space we've got a kind of a plasticky vinyl floor we've got my lovely tartan picnic rug underneath this uh vinyl we've got a piece of hardboard wood kind of stuff with a handle in it that you can open to reveal the spare wheel a full-sized spare wheel not that they're very big wheels anyway um and underneath that piece of black plastic the jack etc are inside the spare wheel so let's take this little metro out for a drive pull out the choke and lock it into place so one of the first things to say about driving this car is the incredible visibility that it has i can like there is no blind spot whatsoever around this entire car uh the lack of headrests helped the low windows help the big windows have the thin pillars all of that it really doesn't like 20 miles an hour uh i've discovered uh second it's really noisy as you just heard and i'll just put it up into third and it's okay but it's a bit kind of it's it just feels a little bit low it's a little bit chuggy uh that it's not absolutely its favorite gear boy's favorite speed for that gear i'm not sure whether it comes across on the video but there is quite a bit of noise vibration and harshness a lot of it comes from this dashboard which has a real rattle in this corner i've damped it quite a bit with some rubber which has really helped it used to be absolutely horrendous kind of deafening amount of plastic rattle um but at the moment it is a lot better the brakes are pretty good they're servo assisted and they're actually four piston calipers on the front i don't anyway you can hear it's got a sweet little idol as well i'll shut up and let you hear these lovely dropped gears once these lights turn green third you know one of the things i've noticed driving this car over the last few days is it's actually got some gum we're keeping up with this like uh next to us quite happily but yeah it's actually got some guts i was not expecting that from a one liter 46 horsepower car but it's actually got some mid range grunt you know that pulling out pulling away was decent another thing that really surprised me about this car is how much confidence i have driving it um i thought i'd be terrified because it's so small but it somehow inspires confidence it's really well planted uh on the road it's got that kick and power that you feel like you need uh in the car these days uh and it just feels really short-footed i'm not sure how else to put it a lot better than i thought it was going to be there is the bus-like uh driving position that people often uh complain about but i don't think it's it's all right i kind of feel like it's a little far away on the top side of the steering wheel i've had the hydro gas uh re-gassed and uh the ride is pretty good it's okay the problem is that roads at the moment certainly around here are poorly uh tiny little tires they're skinny little 12-inch tyres one three five eighties they just kind of go into the pokemons that you can't get lost and stuck in the potholes now why is that acceptable i had a problem initially uh when i was driving this car for the last few days uh that it was just a little bit jerky at lower speeds and acceleration um so having taken the advice from the owners club i've advanced the timing very slightly more than it should be so i've taken about two or three degrees forwards and it definitely seems to be much better so i'm really pleased with that very happily at all right you know what i think we'll risk it let's take it on the carriageway just for one junction we'll see what it's like feels quite far away the energy noise it's okay i think they get intruding in the cabin too much oh well that was fun and loud hopefully you can hear me again now it was all right though we managed we survived i need to drive into some shows in the summer so i needed a bit of practice on the uh bulger carriageways it grips some corners really nicely in this car it's got lovely steering which i really wasn't expecting that at all i like a chunky steering wheel normally but actually there's something quite delicate about this and precise uh that you don't get on a chunkier steering wheel so i really quite like that it just feels lively and happy this car gets very sweet very sweet indeed i've never driven a metro until this week i've never been in a metro until this week or while it's driving so it's quite a revelation it's really quite pleasant it's fun i wouldn't want to be going on very long journeys in it but around town i've enjoyed it over the last few days it's been really really good what surprised me most about it is how sure-footed it is and how much confidence it gives me right that's it i've arrived where i'm supposed to be so uh that is the end of this video i really hope you've enjoyed it um i hope i've shown you everything about this car that you've wanted to see anything that you else you'd like to see that i haven't talked about let me know in the comments um otherwise i hope you like it as much as i like this lovely little car see you soon bye

Channel: Morsels and Motors

Views: 2,784

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AzJ-RTNPZ4M

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021