Identify The Classic Car

Londoners Won't Have Any Trouble

Clue: I never drove one, but rode one every day as a teenager in London.

Answer: September 4

Here it is: The Metropolitan

The Metropolitan: Shrunk in the Wash

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Some cars make you feel like a hero, cars that make you feel like a banker, and one car that makes you feel like you’ve been shrunk in the wash. That car is the Metropolitan, and I love it without reservation.

Consider the recipe. In the early 1950s, Nash of Kenosha, Wisconsin, looked at the American road, saw nothing but chrome-plated aircraft carriers, and asked a question nobody in Detroit had thought to ask: what if a car were small? Not a bit smaller. Properly small. Smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, which was the sort of thing only a foreigner would build. Having asked the question,

Nash did the sensible thing and got a foreigner to build it. The Metropolitan was designed in America by a chap called Bill Flajole, then shipped as an idea to the Austin works at Longbridge, Birmingham, where it was put together by the same hands that built the A40, using the same engine, and sent back across the Atlantic in boxes like a very large Christmas present.

So it is, and I say this with pride, a British car wearing an American frock. Two-tone paint, a wraparound rear window, a continental spare tyre hung off the back like a lifebelt, and under all of it the beating heart of an Austin saloon that would have been quite happy pottering to the shops in Solihull.

Let us get the numbers out of the way, because the numbers are half the joke.

Engine: 1,200 cc four-cylinder to begin with, upgraded in 1956 to the mighty 1,489 cc B-series, the engine that later powered the MGA, though in the Metropolitan it produced a claimed 55 brake horsepower, which is roughly one horse for every gallon of enthusiasm.

Nought to sixty: about 20 seconds. Some magazines got 19.3. Some got 22.4. The difference was probably the wind.

Top speed: a touch over 70 mph, at which point the car, the driver and the continental spare all begin to have opinions.

Wheelbase: 85 inches. That is not a misprint. A Cadillac of the same year had a wheelbase of 129 inches, which means you could park a Metropolitan inside the Cadillac’s wheelbase with room left over for a picnic.

Length: 149.5 inches, or twelve and a half feet, or about the same as a modern Mini, which everyone now considers a normal-sized car. In 1954 it looked like something you would win at a fairground.

Weight: around 1,800 lb. Two grown men can push it uphill. I mention this from experience.

Fuel economy: anywhere from 27 to 41 miles per gallon, depending on whether you were going up the hill or coming back down it.

Price: $1,445 for the hardtop when it went on sale in 1954, $1,469 for the convertible. Miss America was hired to sell it, which tells you who Nash thought was going to buy it. It was, quite openly, the first postwar American car aimed at women, marketed as a second car for the wife to run about in while the husband took the aircraft carrier to work. The wives, being sensible, bought it in large numbers and then refused to give it back.

Now for the detail that separates the true Metropolitan bore from the amateur. For the first five years of production, the car had no boot lid. None. There was a boot, and quite a decent one, but the only way into it was by folding the back seat forward and climbing in after your luggage. This was described at the time as a design feature. It was not until 1959, on the Series IV, that Austin finally cut a hole in the back and hung a lid on it, at which point the price went up to $1,672.60, presumably to cover the cost of the hinges.

Other standard equipment, and I quote the brochure: a map light, electric windscreen wipers, and a cigar lighter. Electric wipers were still a novelty in 1954, and a small boy of my acquaintance in Tobermory would have given a week’s pocket money to switch them on and off. The cigar lighter, in a car with an 85-inch wheelbase, was pure optimism.

And yet. About 95,000 of them were built between 1953 and 1961, which was more than Nash ever expected, and the best year was 1959, when it sold 22,209, a figure that sent the Big Three scurrying off to design the Falcon, the Corvair and the Valiant. Princess Margaret was given one as a wedding present in 1960, and somebody stole it the following February, which suggests that even car thieves have a sense of humour. Steve Jobs’s first car, at fifteen, was a Metropolitan, and I think you can see the influence: small, friendly, rounded at the corners, and impossible to get into the back of.

I have driven a Metropolitan once, on a wet Sunday, and I can report the following. You sit high and close to the glass, like a goldfish that has been given a steering wheel. Everything happens slowly and then all at once. Pedestrians smile at you. Other drivers wave. A man at a petrol station asked if it was a real car or one of those things you put a coin in outside a supermarket. I told him it was British, built in Birmingham, and he said that explained it, though he didn’t say what it explained.

The Metropolitan is not fast, not roomy, not practical, and not, in the usual sense, a serious motor car. It is instead a small, cheerful, well-made argument that a car does not have to be any of those things to be worth having. Sixty-odd years on, most of the aircraft carriers have gone to the scrapyard.

The little Austin in the American frock is still pottering to the shops.

Wheelbase, 85 inches. Smile, considerably wider.