MG Metro

The Rover Cooper was like watching a once-great ’60s band still touring while drawing their pension. The MG Metro was the new wave and a much more worthy successor.

- Jack Grover

The Rover Mini Cooperproves two maxims: “Youcan have too much of a good thing” and “You can’t relive the past”. As big a fan of old Minis as I am I just find it hard to raise much fondness for the Rover-built products of the 1990s, and the Coopers have always left me part frustrated, part disappointed. On the other hand an MG Metro is always a pleasant surprise and is, I feel, a more genuine successor to the original Cooper models of the 1960s – but I will get back to that point.

The basic Austin Metro garnered rave reviews and very strong sales, but I’ll be the first to admit that the MG version, launched in March 1982, did not get the same esteem, never properly squaring up to rivals such as the Ford Fiesta XR2, let alone the likes of the Peugeot 205GTi. But, here’s the thing. British Leyland sold over twice as many MG Metros as they had expected – instead of MGs making up 10 per cent of annual production, until 1985 they were forming 22 per cent. Whatever the model’s relative failings, the MG Metro found a lot of happy buyers, and that’s because it ticks a lot of the same boxes that the original Mini Cooper did in 1961 but that the ’90s recreation did not.