Popularity
The Metro remained one of Britain's most popular cars throughout its production life, even during its final year when it was among the oldest designs on sale in the country. During its early years the Austin Metro was Britain's most popular supermini, often outselling the Ford Fiesta. By the time of the Rover Metro's demise in late 1994, 1,370,000 examples of the two incarnations had been sold in the space of 14 years; averaging at nearly 100,000 sales per year.
This popularity endured in spite of the Metro failing to match the durability of key rivals, notably the Nissan Micra and Volkswagen Polo. This is illustrated well by the findings of Auto Express's 2006 survey which named the Metro as Britain's seventh most scrapped car. Just 21,468 were still in working order at the time of the survey, approximately 1.5% of all those registered. Nearly five years on, that figure has inevitably declined further, with the number remaining as of 2011 now likely to be in four figures.
Many Metros (particularly the pre-1990 Austin models) have been scrapped as a result of the bodyshell's vulnerability to rust. Also, pre-1989 Metros cannot run on unleaded fuel without expensive conversion of the cylinder head reducing these older cars' viability as daily drivers, and often resulting in their being scrapped. An equally large number of Metros were scrapped or disappeared as a result of theft. Early Metros were notoriously easy to steal. Later Rover badged models however had better anti-theft equipment (including an engine immobiliser) which addressed this weakness.
Including the post-1994 Rover 100 Series models, a total of just under 1,500,000 Metros were sold in Britain in less than 20 years, making it the seventh most popular ever sold there.
Lady Diana Spencer (later Diana, Princess of Wales) owned a red W-registered Metro before her engagement to Prince Charles. This car is in the Museum of British Road Transport, Coventry.
Read more about this topic: Austin Metro
Famous quotes containing the word popularity:
“There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“In everything from athletic ability to popularity to looks, brains, and clothes, children rank themselves against others. At this age [7 and 8], children can tell you with amazing accuracy who has the coolest clothes, who tells the biggest lies, who is the best reader, who runs the fastest, and who is the most popular boy in the third grade.”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)