I’ll see your 4 Subaru 360’s and raise you 4 Nash Metros for only $2500! That was David C’s comment when he emailed us the other day. Good one David! If you want a small classic, but the Subies were a little too quirky for you then may we recommend these Nash Metropolitans? While other American manufacturers were churning out land yachts, Nash decided to build something a little smaller. Find this quadruplet here on craigslist out of Oxford, Mississippi. Thanks for the tip David!
If you didn’t know it, it would be easy to mistake the Nash Metropolitan for a European car. It was smaller than most American made cars at the time and it even had a British engine under the hood. Austin provided their tough little four cylinder and Pinin Farina styled the body, so I supposed it was sort of European.
Nash tried to market the car to women with little success. They must have figured that women would appreciate the small size and cute shape more than men. Well, it looks like one man did not appreciate the feminine characteristics of the car!
They were able to sell close to 100,000 of these little guys though. That is a decent figure, but it wasn’t not enough to make them a common sight today. This package looks like a deal for a Metropolitan collector. You can read more about the history of America’s first sub-compact here on AllPar. Now, what is that we see amongst the trees back there… Can you identify all the other cars in the photos?
Fun but I don’t want one that bad to start with a project like this.
Yeah, obviously you are not alone…
Looks like this might be a fun Barnfinds group project. We could all chip in to buy them, transport them to Josh’s place and then we can all meet there and work on them!
I’ve got a shiny new quarter I’ll contribute….
Hey, I will bring a couple of six packs!
I’d rather have the metros but when you consider they’re more than 850 miles further than the subies, well…
Oh and btw, have yet to hear back from the Subaru seller. Wondering if it’s a classic case of putting the ad up on CL and then going off for a week to visit the family. Now the seller will come back and cancel the ad ’cause Uncle Fred wants to restore the Subarus… >_<
Those old Mets were cute but, man, it’s tough to drag my 6′ frame in and out of one!
I remember one of these on a car lot back in the 80’s. Some guy wheeled in one day, bought it, paid for it, then never returned for it. It sat around back for years, until the salesmen pushed it over the bank at the back of the lot. Last account, it was still down there, visible in the winter when the vegetation dies down.
Now if they were Hudson Metropolitans I might be interested . . .
Ditto! Still, gas is going up!
If nothing else, there are enough of them to make a stretch version. Odds are poor that the unit bodies have survived.
These look ‘European’ because they are! The entire thing is an Austin Metropolitan built in Longbridge, Birmingham, England! Although it was desigend for Nash its all austin underneath.
” Beep Beep” always think of that song when I see these.
Gotta love the flames paint job on the cleanest one.
Seems as though there are many more cars parked in that woods…..
When I was a kid there was a nice older couple who lived down the street from us who collected those things. They owned five of them. Two of them were drivers and the other three were parts cars. I was about 10, and would go visit them about once a week. They were nice enough to let me sit in one of the driver cars a couple of times. I remember thinking that the Metropolitan was just about the coolest little car. They were also into short-wave radios and could talk to people many miles away, which was also very cool for a 10 year-old. Those visits have remained a strong memory for me some 48 years later. Someone will want these cars. If memory serves the running gear was shared with other Austin built cars? The styling was all Nash though…