MG Mal wrote:the earlier cars (80-84) have a certain charm to them, and seem to suffer less in the rot depratment unless really trashed.
Yes, with the benefit of time since production ceased, this is certainly how it looks now, but back in the '80s, when I was still with Subaru, one of the dealerships used to see a lot of BMC/BL/Austin-Rover stuff as that was the franchise prior to the International Motors brands being taken on.
We had an early car, on a 1981 X-plate, that needed new footwells, wings, front valance and various patches before it had reached 7 years of age. Ordinarily, repairing wouldn't have been viable but we still had a large stores department dedicated to the BL stuff, so muggins here volunteered to go into work on Sundays and, in exchange for the gaffer letting me use the workshop for my own project cars, I did the required welding to the miniMETRO.
At that time, the later models that were still practically new came with fitted liners in the front wings so we used to offer fitment of these to any customers who came in with earlier cars whose wings hadn't yet started to rust through. Takeup was high, in one week alone we sold and fitted the liners to the owners of eight cars!
Another good little earner that we had going which involved the Metros was LHD-RHD conversion.
This involved a contact of the proprietor bringing cars from the kinder climates of Southern Europe into the workshop, where we'd do the conversion which was almost as straighforward on Metros as it was on minis. The converted cars would always sell themselves since no other trader in the area had such utterly unmarked Metros in their stock, all such converted cars were fitted with the arch liners as a matter of course, I know of three cars that are still around today, one a local show car, one in a lockup with deflated suspension and flat paint but otherwise fine and the third surfaced only last April and is being used to reshell a very rotten MG Metro.
So at the time, the late cars were too new to be showing signs of rot and the only rust we would deal with then would be in those early cars. Now, of course, it's possible to observe that, as you suggest, more of the survivors are indeed early examples.
I love the things and will have another some day.
