IDRIVEACLASSIC reviews: 80s MK1 Austin Metro

i am so excited to announce that idrava classic is now sponsored by adrian flux one of the uk's leading classic car insurers if you're looking for classic car insurance i've popped a link to adrian flux in the description box below hi guys it's jeff from idriver classic now i'm sure i definitely said in my last video that that was the last video for 2020 but then i thought it's 40 years of the metro what are we doing we haven't had a metro video this year so we're going to end the year on a high note and we're going to see it out with this austin metro hle now if you live abroad you may have never seen one of these in your life but it was one of the most popular cars of the 1980s in great britain so popular in fact that even princess diana had one hers was red but not quite this shade now go back to the point if you've never seen this car you're in for a treat because we're gonna go around the outside we're gonna have a look inside we're even gonna have a look at the amazing split level seating and we're gonna take her outfit take her take him out for a drive as well because if you've noticed the number plate his name is actually timmy so i need to make sure i don't get that wrong today now the car's owned by one of my very best friends ryan and it got me started with my love of metros again over the last few years and uh hopefully it'll give me my enthusiasm back from metros again today so let's kick off by having a look around the outside when it was launched the austin metro was said to be the british card to beat the world arriving in a really new automotive world where competitors not only came from mainland europe but japanese manufacturers as well who seemed far more organized and advanced when it came to making cars which people not only wanted to buy but found to be consistent in a way that well they've just not been used to especially in the 70s but the austin metro came out fighting it had a 300 million pound investment of a new car manufacturing process which included a new assembly plant and micro processor controlled robots which gave precise and constant quality to all stages of the build which trust me if you've seen some of the 70s stuff you'll know was an absolute godsend and a real winner in terms of pushing marketing messages the process was said to be so slick and refined that every metro leaving long bridge met the most critical quality standards ever developed for a high volume production car which is big words when you're developing a car which is essentially org standard budget motoring there were 27 processes involved in the painting and finishing of the car including under sealing and wax injection which was incredible for the time because of course this is just cheap motoring there were five models available at launch including your base spec the l with additional comfort including the split action rear seat which i am going to demo for you later the hle as we are testing here today which was said to be the fuel economy specialist with additional features on top of what the l offered the 1.3 s which boasted a far more sporty interior which weirdly includes the mention of a clock and top of the range which was the 1.3 hls it had every bell and whistle and velour upholstery what a time to be alive to delve deeper into the specs and respect for this car in particular the hle as we're testing here today came with extras on top of what the l had so these included the styled halogen headlamps with bright surrounds and integral side lamps and indicators a side rubbing strip a glow ring cigar lighter a clock push button radio and of course that famous economy engine now it's worth noting that anything that you don't see on the walk around that i've just mentioned there we'll have a look through when we get inside the car the steering on these is exactly what you'd expect it's rack and pinion and it's got a 33 and a half foot turning circle and it's 3.3 turns lock to lock and coupled with the amazing visibility and higher seating position it's no wonder that these were the go-to car for the british school of motoring for many many years the brakes on these are dual circuit hydraulic system with a circuit failure monitor disk the front and drums to the back coupled with the 998 cc engine give us really sharp breaking and short short stopping distances and make it safer to use in modern traffic than some of the other older classics as you'll see under the bonnet it's single su carb on these with mechanical fuel pump and a decent 6.6 gallon tank hidden away under the floor pan at the back and when we're out driving i will demo it for you but we are running on hydro gas displacers for our suspension these have been replaced by the current owner and when running correctly they are said to be akin to riding on a magic carpet if you're watching this video with the intention of buying yourself a metro to get these units done yourself you'll be looking at the best part of a thousand pounds to have the whole system overhauled i did it i think it was a good investment um and realistically you can't really drive them if they are down on the haunches so just be aware that's something to be prepared for if you are looking to buy one however when the car was sold it was said to only need servicing every 12 000 miles so perhaps you can put those few pennies saved towards the new hydro gas units for those of you watching from abroad and thinking gosh what is this tiny tiny little car with an end cap safety rating of zero and was it really that popular well look it was so popular that even princess diana owned one which they do reference in the latest series the crown or b it's completely the wrong model and completely the wrong color but i probably sure i'm not bitter anyway i'll hand over to ryan the owner of this fantastic car he's had timmy quite a long time now and has shared his thoughts on rescuing the car ownership adventures and all the bits in between so it's time for me to hand over to you ryan hi my name's ryan and as steph said i'm the proud owner of my boston metro hle which i've owned now for four or five years well i bought the car because um when i was little probably about four or five my cousin anna um had a metro as her first car and i absolutely loved going around in it i think because you know i was only short at the time and the doors are quite low i really enjoyed the fact that i could see outside really easily um and also i found it hilarious uh the the fact that her car was a bit ropey and um i remember two incidents in particular one when we were at some traffic lights and she went to pull away and the seat collapsed and she ended up lying on her back which obviously i found really funny um but also on another occasion and she couldn't get it into gear when we were at a zebra crossing and a man had to get out and come and help um and i know this sounds silly but i love the noise that the car made as you've probably heard already the gear boxes are really whiny um and yeah i just thought that they were really really fun and you know once i'd grown up i always kind of found them very nostalgic and um i think when i was at the nec in 2015 i had my morris miner on display um i went over and had a look at all the metros and it just really really kind of brought all of that flooding back and it was after that really that i decided i definitely wanted one and started looking out for the right one to come up well i bought timmy as i said earlier from ebay or through ebay it's um as far as i understand it was bought by the original owner and kept until about 20 2014 when it was bought in a house clearance unfortunately i haven't been able to find out despite writing to the previous owner's address where or why the car came off the road but i'm i can only assume that perhaps someone gave up driving for example and it was put in in the garage and kind of left there um as you've probably seen from the walk around the car is far from perfect and you know there are blemishes on it so it certainly got um daily use at some point um and uh when i bought the car it needed um welding doing on both front floor pans and the front valance was rusty and one of the ring wings was rusty as well so i have no doubts that at some point it was used you know pretty much every day and you know suffered the same rust problems as any other metro but um the fact that it was laid up from uh you know about 1992 from what i can work out um with only 28 000 miles on the clock has probably you know done a lot of favors in terms of preserving it in you know relatively really really good condition because um you know there is no rust on the wheel arches or any of the other key areas um either it's a really original car and like i say you know despite the fact that it's uh far from blemish free it's it's my car and i love it for what it is i'll never forget the time that i um took the car to um a course with uh you know with work and i was coming back and it was kick out time from the local high school and uh i stopped at the pelican crossing because they were all wanting to cross and loads of the kids were pointing and laughing at the car and saying i think one of them shouted out looks like noddy's car which i found quite funny um i'll never forget also once when i was out with steph we were up in yorkshire on the yorkshire moors and had just pulled away after having pulled over for something and um it was a really really steep hill and uh i went up to second gear and perhaps i should have just uh kind of admitted defeat and held it in first and um yeah this cyclist actually overtook us which which was hilarious maybe unbelievable but honestly it did happen um another one we're just hilarious for the fact that it's a metro in uh 2019 with people going around in it we were out about and there were five of us in the car we went on a day out to oxford um you know bumbling around these roads and speeding down the motorway you know with five people in the car um i just find it hilarious i wanted to bring you inside and talk you through now i think one of the things that will surprise people watching this it's just how spacious inside it is because when you look at it from the outside you think it's going to be really cramped but if you remember this was sold as a small family car so i had to be big enough to fit the whole family in and i think it does a pretty good job now what we've got inside here we have got a little bit more than your base back like in my cast if you ever watch the video of my car you'll know that it hasn't really got much so this has got a bit more with the first thing being the glove box over here we've got the glove box um which is great i would love one and they will only ever put on the higher spec cars and then coming into the middle you've got your heater control unit now the heater on these cars is usually amazing but this one is a bit problematic so unfortunately the heat matrix has been changed but it sounds like it's got a problem with its flaps ladies at home um we can relate now coming down from that we've got our cigar lighter and then you've got your factory fitted radio now this is a medium and long wave radio and one of the nicest things is is it has got that little um that little austin logo on as well with the three blue bars again just really nice detailing you could also get these in cassette tape version which is what i've got in my car obviously aftermarket fitted by myself and it wasn't standard with it being a bass spec car now coming in front of us we have got a very different dash layout to what we've got in my car so i always wish that i'd done some footage with mine but mine's in storage at the moment so i couldn't really drag her out for filming now on mine to the left hand side where the clock is i have got my temperature gauge and fuel gauge split so like two half semi-circles now in this it's a little bit different because you've got your clock and then the two gauges there where you see the fuel and the temperature on mine that's just a gear pattern what a waste and then over on the right hand side of course you have got that speedo now another really interesting detail on these is you can see the warning lights in the middle and you've probably just thought to yourself why is there a blank space in the middle well that's because on the earlier cars so i think 80 and some 81. i know mine's in 81. it's got it but you never seem to see it from 82 onwards that's where your seatbelt warning light would have been but of course they were looking by this point to try and quite a few costs and one of those was they thought well people know if they've got seatbelt on or not so they just cut that out and they took it out hence why there's a blank space there now coming in front of us we've got our two stalks very traditionally laid out so in your earlier british cards you would have had your indicators off to the right hand side on this it's a little bit more conventional because of course when it was sold it was british card to beat the world so it's done on the at this point more traditional indicators to the left styling it's got indicators to your left here and you've got your main beam and you've got your horn as well now coming over to our right hand side we've got the wipers as you can see we've got two speed on those and you will have noticed a rear wiper so let me show you where the controls for those are now coming down to my right hand side i'll talk about this dubious uh this gps switch in just a second and so you've got reheated screen your hazards your fogs the stubby switch here is for the fan heater don't ask and then on the right hand side there we have got the rear wiper it's a great little car i want to take you out in it but before we start it up i'm going to talk to you about this gearbox because if you're re-glide you'll have already spotted that fourth gear isn't marked as a fourth gear and this it's marked as an e so let me explain that now the transmission unit on this is a hydraulically operated diaphragm spring clutch i've got full speed and it's an all synchro gearbox now really interestingly the final drive ratio on these hles is three point four four to one but if you'd gone for another one liter so like mine for example with just the standard four gears you're looking at three point six four seven to one so what does this mean when we're behind the wheel well it kind of means that basically you can cruise um at much higher speeds at much lower revs which really gives you that fuel economy but the only payoff is it is a little bit gutless when you're trying to get up hills and stuff like that it's much slower to accelerate than some of the other one liters that i've driven and in fact i know that ryan could have mentioned that we got overtaken by cyclists this is indeed true we did get overtaken by a cyclist but the great thing about this car is is when you get onto a motorway and you put your foot down you get amazing fuel economy so i know that ryan has got up from me so i live up in west yorkshire ryan lives down on the south coast and i know that he's done it for like less than 20 quid before and it makes obviously it does insane mileage for so little money on long journeys but around town you don't feel it as much but it's one of those things and it was a really interesting idea and it's really interesting not gimmick but when you think about the fact that this car boasts 60 miles to the gallon when driving at a steady speed of 50 miles per hour it's pretty impressive for a car from the early 80s so let's go start it up remember him him sorry him let's get him started up and uh listen to that cut listen to that engine so remember we've got that a plus 998 cc under there um would have liked a 1.3 but hey we'll take what we can get at this stage and i'll let you have a listen if you can hear that noise it's actually the clock it's very slight so you might not hear it at home i'll get this car started up [Music] this is where it gets really clever so these seats were on every single metro apart from the standard you can see you can fold them both away to give you lots of space there or you can split the seats because of course you get three adults in the back there so you can split it down which is actually something that we did camping that parcel shelf is removable so when you are dividing the seats down you just divide it like that and they come forward but you can get so much in there someone went camping with one person in the back and we were able to divide those two seats for all the luggage candy eh so i thought what we'd do is walk you up through the gearbox now listen out to that gearbox one it's one of my favorite things a bit like the anglia you'll hear what i mean in a minute and just like that we're up into that fourth gear there or the e as it would be called now as you can see it cruises absolutely effortlessly i'm going to try and find a hill today to take you up to show you all what it's like because it does get a little bit gutless another thing with metro's is is that especially when i was younger is that they were known really as a bit of a pensioner mobile something that granny or granddad would have to go down to the local post office to pick up the pension or maybe to their local branch of summerfield to pick up some groceries it was never really seen as a very cool car but just like things come back into fashion the humble little metro is quickly gaining status as a bit of a fun hot hatch which i'm not really surprised at because it is not only quite good on handling so as you can see here as we're going around there's real minimal body roll and because we've got that hydro gas suspension it's really taking the bumps in its stride and once people have stopped laughing at them and they get in them and go for a drive realistically they do drive so much better with the hydro gas done without it it does feel a bit jarring but as soon as people get into these and they stop laughing and they start listening and they start experiencing many naysayers do change their opinion of the austin metro now back in the day it did really well in that small car market because it was an offering from the world of what was british leyland and it was becoming austrian rover and it provided something quite different because a lot of cars had come before it that people were readily taking the mickey out of the marina the allegro and people were just kind of a bit turned off by the world of british leyland now when the metro came into play people were saying wow it's different it's unique it's new and i'm not really surprised because british leyland didn't do what they'd always done and looked inward and thought what do we want what do we think people like they actually went out and they canvassed for opinion so they spoke to fleet managers they spoke to the kind of people that would buy the cars like royal mail and they said what is it that you want about a small car that we can bring to market that we can provide and it was coupled with that coupled with the fact that they spent i believe 300 million um developing the metro up a lot of that was spent on the plant because if you ever watched any of the adverts for these you'll know that it's one of the first cars to be built by robots at british leyland um or austin rovers it was then known um so a lot of the money went into that and to keep it an economical small car it's why they stuck with that a series engine um so a lot of people kind of had very minimal expectations when this came to market but actually it saw off a lot of the competition so a lot of people were saying you know look at what everybody else is coming out with you had renault you had fear you had practically everybody you had the japanese manufacturers that had come in and really brought something new because of course they you had things like the starlet you have things like the micra things were coming in thick and fast that really competed in this small space now there were so many things that people don't know about these cars at the time they were i believe the most efficient for drag in their class in terms of aerodynamics and once you get into it so you can see they're actually cutting myself off that is a bit uh it is a bit weak getting up those hills um but it provided so much and one of the most interesting things is is because the differential and the gearbox are located under the sump um it also managed to lose some of the length so i believe in terms of that super mini market it's kind of four to six inches shorter without losing any space inside the cabin than its competitors do i fancy my chances in an austin metro in an accident absolutely not there's really no crash protection in these whatsoever but if you are looking in that super mini space you're not really going to find it on any of them now one of the things that i find really enjoyable about the metro is that actually it's really comfortable so as you can probably see from the video and for the walk around it's very roomy inside which means that even somebody of my stature can drive quite comfortably and that you can enjoy the drive and you don't feel cramped up and although it does feel a little bit tinny it doesn't feel as tinny and as flaky and as wish-washy as some of the other stuff in this small car market for the era i think that they get a bit of a bad rap for rot because i don't think they're really rot much worse than many of the other 80s stuff i think unfortunately they just got a bit of a reputation for it because with it being a budget car and being so cheap to purchase especially secondhand people would just buy them and run them into the ground so when people are constantly running the same model of car into the ground the examples that you're seeing out aren't going to be good in their masses whereas some of the other small and some kind of mini cars people seem to take a little bit more care over so unfortunately the metro quickly became unloved and so kind of ten years down the line and in fact spoiler um and a little bit of an insert is that these hydro gas units were only ever given a 10 year shelf life so they started to sag as well so they were sagging they were rotting so by the early 90s they picked up the nickname met rot which actually is yeah it's justified they do rot out but every car does but i think it's mainly down to user error and a bit of negligence people weren't really looking after them because they were so cheap i'll leave you with this it's 40 years in the metro i hope we get to see 50 but will we get to see 60 apart from a few cars in the museum i honestly don't know i don't think it left the same shelf life as some of our cars from the 50s 60s and 70s and really that is a pity and with that that's the end of our video it has been a fantastic year on eye driver classic i've tried to show you lots of different stuff from three wheelers to mr bean's actual mini off the tv series and all the bits in between like a tractor for example and model cars i really hope you've enjoyed it thank you so much for watching it has been almost been a weird year overall it's been such a great year showing you lots of different stuff and keeping you entertained at home now hopefully fingers crossed we're getting much better 2021 we'll get a few car shows in and life will start bringing us back round to normal but wherever you are in the world i'm sending my love because i know it's been a weird year and until next time and until next year take care and drive safely

Channel: idriveaclassic

Views: 20,897

Rating: 4.9642501 out of 5

Keywords: Austin Rover, Austin metro, rover metro, Austin mk1 metro, mini metro, Austin mini, princess Diana, princess Diana car, princess Diana red car, Austin metro review, Austin metro driving, 80s car, 80s car review, rare car review, Austin metro hle, classic British car, old British car, Austin mini metro, longbridge, pride of longbridge, a+ series engine, a series engine, super mini, driving in England, classic car revving, LC8, nap safety rating, austin, british leyland

Id: xotxbmdjA_g

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020