The used car market is responding very favorably to vehicles of ages past that have been able to eke the most miles from a single gallon of gas. The poster-child for the movement seems to be the oft-maligned Geo Metro, which is sometimes changing hands today for a similar dollar amount as it sold for when new in the early '90s. We're not so sure you could pry so many of our own hard-darned dollars from our sweaty palms for a vehicle that old, and Car and Driver is positive that they wouldn't spend it either. In fact, the auto-scribes at the mag have written a three-page article explaining exactly why it isn't a good idea to buy a used Metro to save on your gas bill.
To back up their opinions, past road tests of the Metro were checked and found seriously deficient. For instance, the '92 Metro took 220 feet to stop from 70 mph and 13.1 seconds to reach sixty. Along with that, C&D got just 39 mpg from it in testing. Oh, and ABS brakes and airbags are absent as well. What's more, the Metro's tailpipe emissions are quite a bit worse than the economy cars of today. So, while the Metro will surely return high fuel mileage numbers when driven with a bit of sense, safety, performance and emissions all conform to standards that we set a long time ago. In other words, you could do better with that 7K by purchasing a car just a few years old.
[Source: Car and Driver]
To back up their opinions, past road tests of the Metro were checked and found seriously deficient. For instance, the '92 Metro took 220 feet to stop from 70 mph and 13.1 seconds to reach sixty. Along with that, C&D got just 39 mpg from it in testing. Oh, and ABS brakes and airbags are absent as well. What's more, the Metro's tailpipe emissions are quite a bit worse than the economy cars of today. So, while the Metro will surely return high fuel mileage numbers when driven with a bit of sense, safety, performance and emissions all conform to standards that we set a long time ago. In other words, you could do better with that 7K by purchasing a car just a few years old.
[Source: Car and Driver]
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