A Rare Surviving Austin Metro Vanden Plas with an Incredible 21,923 Miles from New - SOLD!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.พ. 2025
- SORRY NOW SOLD - SIMILAR WANTED
A rare surviving Austin Metro Vanden Plas with an incredible 21,923 miles from new.
EQUIPMENT
All steel unitary construction, laminated windscreen, bronze tinted glass, bright screen inserts, black rolled section bumpers, wrap around cappings, bright finish grille, twin door mirrors, bright finish door handles and tailgate lifter, coachline with ‘VP’ motifs, glass sunroof, rear mudflaps, locking concealed fuel filler, front head restraints, rear parcel shelf, brushed nylon headlining, front parcel shelf rubber mat with ‘VP’ motif, wood door cappings and carpet kick strips, tachometer, digital clock, heated rear window, rear wash/wipe, cigar lighter, removable sunroof and carry bag.
EXTERIOR
Finished in factory original colour Cashmere Gold Metallic (code GMD), this fantastic range topping luxury Metro is every inch a rare surviving delight and boasts a bright finish to the paintwork. Minor imperfections can only be seen upon close scrutiny and include marks on the tailgate around the boot lock, a small ding on the bonnet and tiny scratches. Structurally excellent, there is no evidence of weld repairs to the underside and all panels are straight with uniform gaps and free from corrosion. All trims sections are original, intact and free from damage and the ‘VP’ badges, decals and coachline remain just as Austin intended. Once a common sight on our roads, this fantastic example really does stir up nostalgia and with such low miles covered represents a wonderful opportunity to the collector and enthusiast alike.
INTERIOR
Vanden Plas, the renowned bespoke coachbuilders and trimmers started out in 1870 in Brussels and were synonymous with upmarket prestige vehicles. In later years, the name was associated with British Leyland and Austin Rover Group cars, specifically for their range topping luxury models. The plush interior of this Metro Vanden Plas is completely original and in perfect preserved condition. The Rachelle upholstery in Osprey trim colour (code AMX) extends from the seats to the door cards and rear panels. The spotlessly clean fabric is completely free from wear and still retains its fullness, as do the matching brown carpets protected by genuine Metro rubber floor mats. The wood door cappings are perfect, as is the fascia and leather trimmed steering wheel. All functions including the original push button LW/MW radio operate fully. A truly remarkable interior in a superb preserved state, the ultimate small car luxury.
ENGINE & TRANSMISSION
The legendary and time proven A-Series engine of 1275cc displacement needs no introduction. Producing an ample 62bhp, this spritely Metro can hold its own in modern traffic and is tremendous fun with Mini like road manners. The four speed (3+E) all synchromesh gearbox delivers light and exact changes. Robust simple mechanics and excellent parts availability allow everyday use and classic motoring without high running costs. Ideal for the classic show circuit!
WHEELS, TYRES & BRAKES
Five factory standard 12” steel wheels remain with the car and are shod in 155/70 R12 tyres with excellent tread remaining. The original black centre caps with ‘VP’ emblem are in excellent order but one chrome embellishers is missing. The dual line servo-assisted brakes with 21.3cm discs up front and 17.8cm drums at the rear pull the car up quickly and safely.
HISTORY FILE
An absolutely fantastic history file supports this very rare and collectible Austin Metro Vanden Plas. Registered new on 11th August 1983 by Austin Main Dealers Hartwells of Banbury, the first keeper being a Mr P Shepherd. Just two further keeper since and just 21,923 miles from new, this example really has lead a cherished existence. Discovered by KGF Classic Cars after a period of inactivity the decision was made to offer it again to a lucky new owner. Every MOT from new up to 2010 along with masses of service invoices not only uphold the mileage but offer an insight to the fastidious maintenance bestowed upon the car. The original A5 wallet houses the service booklet and consumer guides and an original sales brochure is included.
The driving experience of this car is fully commensurate with such a low mileage, low owner car with the clear ‘want for nothing’ mentality of the previous keepers. A hugely fun classic car and an absolute delight.
MOT October 2015, HPI Clear, Approved Used Car Certificate.
Your videos are amazing, without it being your main objective you are creating a beautiful archive of the best examples of now rare and fondly remembered cars . Thankyou KGF
Thank you for the kind words, it is much appreciated.
Vanden Plas interiors were nicer than the car itself.
A splash of wood and chrome. Lovely!
Great car, great starter, great socks.
+jasonbourne384 Thanks!
Takes me back to the 80's
I had two MK1 metros, an X reg city and an A reg city x
Still looks clean and modern
It sure does
Considering how these cars rust, it's so good to see one in such good condition. I hope this will be cherished
This is an amazing example we hope it goes to a good home!
I just love that back in the day a bit of wood trim made a car luxurious
Yes luxury item :-)!
I watch these videos of these car's and takes me back to the 1990s when I was A young boy my dad had these cars and uncles and mate's
Thank you for sharing!
The VDP Metro's were fitted with the MG Metro power unit, which made it a desirable up-market small car for the retired folks. The car sold well.
Thank you for sharing!
Wow a metro with no rust 😂 beautiful car looks really well what a classic very few left and especially in show room condition like this beauty
Thank you for the kind words.
I remember the Metro being hailed as the future of fuel efficient motoring..at a time when we were being carried around in Mk 3 Cortinas and Mini 1000's
Thank you for sharing!
Never has the description of a car as a classic been stretched so thin.
Thank you for your comment!
That’s insane. My nan had one and we used to get her to wheelspin it! Lol
Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for uploading. Had a 1984 Austin Metro and wish I kept it.
Thank you for sharing!
Would love to know where you got the time machine from that you use to go back and fetch these cars from when they were new. :)
Gorgeous
Thank you
A very nice example of a Austin Metro Vanden Plas. I can't recall seeing one of these cars for a very long time as they were renowned for being rust boxes but I do remember them being around of course.
I noticed the oil pressure lamp didn't illuminate when you switched on ignition. Has the bulb blown or switch faulty in engine block?
Thank you for sharing this, very very rare car to have surely in that condition now!
Thank you for sharing!
You don't see many other cars from back then because they were all rust buckets back then. The only cars from then that have survived have been well looked after or rustproofed by the owner from new or dry garaged for most of the time. Fiestas, Novas etc were all just as bad as Metros for rusting.
What a great video of a lovely looking car. Where is the walnut in the interior and the picnic trays?
I remember passing an old folks home going to school everyday I'd stop and marvel at the high top wheel chair accessible silver green metro. Going to see if I can find out who made those wheel chair metros conversions on goople. There were loads in the old folks homes Brown, a kind of russet brown I can still see those beauty wheel trims lol. Find one that's rust free and protect it. Laugh but they are becoming collectable. I am a mini guy and yeah they have faults just like minis. Currently have two matching numbers original standard bore sizes and original paint the lot 1978 mini vans one owner from new. My dads just left it in his name and run maintain them for him. I really for some reason love these old metros. I shouldn't but I do 😊
How many trailers you used to see with metro wheels on them.
Thank you for sharing enjoy the mini vans!
These videos are like forzavista in Forza motorsport but in real life!!! Another awesome car by the way.
Very nice. What sort of price range would one of these be in?
Stunning motor
Thank you!
My brother had a maestro vp in dark blue 1986 c plate it had full leather electric everything the bongs used to drive us mad but those van den plas were high spec
I bet you miss the bongs now?!
Me again! Yes, had one of these and went from one repair to another.. Mine too was the Vanden plas identical to this but in a metallic red. The interior was exactly the same. Tidy looking small car in its day but the build quality was shocking!
I went from this to a Mk2 Golf gti and never looked back.
What sort of repairs?
I had a Mini Clubman which apart from a knackered fuel pump never let me down. My mate's little W reg 'mini-Metro' (one of the first ones) got mercilessly thrashed and never let him down once, and apart form a lot of tyres (he insisted on fitting cheap crap and leaning hard on said cheap crap) it didn't rack up any garage time.
Our mate's 'bread van' mk2 Polo was comically fragile by comparison and cost him a lot of money and waiting for one of us to come to his aid!
Hi Chris, yeah had loads of problems with it. It was all repaired on warranty at the time. Had engine replaced, alternator, water pump and radiator as I remember. Kind of thought I was a touch unlucky. There you go..
+Alan Southern
Bloody hell Alan! pretty bad!
We had a lot of BL and Rover stuff over the years (Grandad was a salesman for British Leyland Trucks) and found it to be as good as anything else we also owned.
I guess your car was a Monday morning special, it does happen I suppose!
Nice car I've had 3 metros mg 1.3s and a city x looks good in gold.
CAMPBELL NUTTING thanks for sharing
Travelled 100 mile journey in the back of a metro in '81, unbelievably uncomfortable rear bench seat, my father was collecting his brand new rover SD1 2300s, lovely car but very troublesome, typical British car of the time, pity no real cars from Britain with character any more.
Royal family etc still use range rovers and Jag xj.
Princess Diana drove a metro before she married.
Thank you for sharing!
Are my first ever car talk about nostalgia!!!!
Thank you for sharing!
it's funny how car's we didn't like a few years ago ,is the car's we like now
The Vanden Plas Princess 1100/1300 of the eighties.
Panel gaps not quite visible from the moon !
Jeremy Clarkson would adore this
What a beautiful car - I had a yellow 1980 HLE version, and this brought back a lot of memories (although mine wasn't nearly this plush). I could feel myself reaching for the choke, or the headlight switch on the left side of the steering column, and that ashtray got a LOT of use :) Didn't this version have a 'trip computer'? I couldn't see it. And I'm surprised it didn't have electric windows or a cassette player, as these were optional extras for mine, at least according to the instruction booklet.
Thank you for sharing.
Loads of these at bicester heritage
What kind of person bought a Metro Vanden Plas in its day? It looks like a small Rover on the inside, which is how it was branded a few years later.
Thank you for sharing!
All of your classic cars are gorgeous
Old, pompously lower middle class codgers with a private pension; buying something for the wife to take to the shops. He of course would be driving a top-of-the-line Rover. The sort of stuffy individual who would've been ex-services and high up the food chain of local government. As for the brand loyalty, they were a bit like Volvo drivers, except that in their younger days, they may have owned a P6 3500S or a big P5; the idea of, "I'm a Viking! Move over you civilian fool!" pomposity. I know this because my ex wife's dreadful parents, an ex- Squadron Leader from WW2 and his ancient pink-rinse octogenarian wife who was Anne Robinson incarnate, (and both church-going hypocrites), were of this distinct mould of demographic. He even bought one of those crappy Indian-sourced Rover Citycar contraptions: as though THAT were buying British! Utterly narrow-minded people who projected nothing but their own ignorance and selfish ways; thankfully now long gone!
My grandad had a E reg VP. Had every luxury you could think of at the time. He got it second hand just under a year old.
You know your getting old when you think Christ I drove or had a ride in one of these
+billy mcauliffe very true!
I still have one!!
youtube stabilization gives it a psychedelic touch
Why slam the doors ?
To keep you awake
It's looks like the first generation Suzuki 800 shift.
Whoever buys this, get it treated by Ziebart.
Nice socks
Thank you, we love red socks!
Had two back in the day. First a very early one UCH655X basic model my very first car loved it. Then had a Vanden Plas 1987 on an E plate which was a knightmare worst car I ever owned and it eventually got nicked off my mums drive. Who ever nicked it I f I ever find out who it was I owe you a beer.
Thank you for sharing!
جميلة جدان
Thank you!
Love your videos but please stop slamming the doors 👍
Thank you for your feedback!
Unfortunately, like MG variants, these were put together by AR themselves, take a look at how a real VP was put together and it is rather different. There would be very little difference between this and a standard metro other than some plastic trim and plastic chrome strip.
Thank you for your comment!
Metro Vanden Plas had rev counter, padded headrests and walnut trimmings every luxury a supermini could offer at that time, it sold well. But later it didn’t get 5 speed gearbox when rivals were. The sales dropped, This is due to the fact that it had a noisy ageing A-series engine; they were working on replacement in late sixties, but didn’t have enough money until the late eighties to develop the K-series engine. By then the Vanden Plas marque was gone, what a shame.
Thank you for sharing!
Vanden Plas?
Where's the wood dashboard, where's the leather?
With that velour interior it's more like the Austin Metro Zapp Brannigan Edition! 😀
Such items were not supplied as standard on this Vanden Plas model.
don't make them like that anymore first car I crashed
Don't make them like that anymore thank God
I say this as an American who presently owns 4 British cars, and 4 cars in total. What a piece of crap!
Very posh small car
Thank you!
WAIT!! Is that a manual choke on a modern car?!! No wonder the British car industry is dead.
Thank you for sharing!
That's not exactly what you'd call a modern car mate. That is from the early-mid 1980's, alot of cars had manual chokes on them, our Peugeot 205 did.
Though to be fair it wasn't exactly a modern engine in this, whilst the A-Plus series was indeed a great little economical engine, that in 1.3 and turbo form was pretty peppy apparently, it dated back to the mid-50's so technologically speaking yes the Metro was abit behind the times, though in some areas it was right up-to-date in it's day.
The mainstream British car industry is dead due to many things but the concepts/designs of the actual cars aren't as much to do with it.
The main issues were complacency, lazy trade union workers, lack of care and attention in the building of the cars (leading to loads of quality faults), strikes, silly managers, lack of investment in new models (which were actually being developed at the time the AR6 concept was to replace the Metro in the late 80's but BAE who owned Rover at the time wouldn't fund it), no help from Thatchers government to encourage growth of even new car companies.
All sorts of things you can't really blame it on one particular thing they all conspired to kill off our car industry over the years.
Sorry, "mate", I'm not sure where you're from (Scotland, Australia perhaps?), but in the US no cars had manual chokes after 1971 or or '72, and by then only a handful of obsolete vehicles still had them here...One of the only good things that came about due to the new emission regulations at the time in America.
It's things like this, as well as girling brakes, cork gaskets, side curtains and non- synchromesh transmissions that the British car industry refused to update and upgrade in a timely manner that killed the country's entire auto industry.
Say what you will about the unions, and Thatcher, blah blah...the truth of the matter is that the only reason British cars continued to sell at all was because of the wonderful romance, look, and feel (and smell) of those archaic and obsolete materials and styling.
It took the Japanese to show the world that it was possible to have all of the good things that British Leyland had to offer in a vehicle, with almost none of the bad, and simply but bluntly put, inexcusable lack of engineering and quality control.
I am lucky enough to own a new Jaguar F-Type, who's designer and manufacturer is TATA of India. The car is cutting edge in every way, and STARTS UP EVERY TIME, unlike my beloved and despised Triumph TR-8.
That's right, TATA of India. They are the folks that got Jaguar right, NOT the British. Shameful! As well as the other premium marks of the British Empire, all gone now, and the Germans have both Rolls and Bentley. This sort of complete collapse only could have been brought about by years of inept or non-existent engineering, resistance to change and technology, and just plain disregard for people's needs and wants.
Yes TATA owns Jaguar/Land Rover. Triumph/TVR/Wollsley/Rootes Group/Talbot/Rover/Riley/Morris/Standard and coutless others are all gone. MG are owned by Nanjing and are still made here in Longbridge but to a Chinese design I think. Only ones left are a few very specialty makers and I think Lotus is still going.
The lack of engineering talent or ability to develop new vehicles or technologies was certainly not the problem, in fact Rover in their later years gave us a Turbine powered car that apparently reached 100 mpg in testing.
The main reasons were as you say lack of wanting to change (mainly management and the bean counters moreso than the workforce and the engineers), a workforce that was pretty new to some of the changes and not properly trained on things.
Incompetent management who just wanted to develop new models as quickly and cheaply as they could using as many existing parts as they could from the parts bin. They did tie up with Honda which was a good move in the hard economic times of the late 70's but then Rover's just become Honda's with slightly different bodies and interiors, and they weren't always built as well as their Honda counterparts. Which is funny becuase we have a Honda plant here in the UK at Swindon LOL.
As I say new concepts can been seen at some of the museums and if you ask the likes of Harris Mann who designed the Allegro and other cars he'll tell you that alot of their original ideas and sketches which were right with the times couldn't be built because they were dictated to lots of stupid requirements, like the Austin Maxi only being allowed to have a hatchback despite the fact the Allegro and Princess being perfect body styles to have one. Plus they had to have certain criteria which just didn't make sense.
That and as I say there was hardly any funding for the new designs and ideas to come to fruition as head bosses were happy blodding along with what they had just minorly updating every what 10 years in the case of the Metro here (the original Austin version you see here lasted from 1980-1990 and the Rover version which btw was a huge leap forward in all areas, still lasted till 1997 whilst being renamed the Rover 100 but by then the 1970s-era shell scored an abysmal 1 point in the EuroNcap crash tests whilst everyone else (VW, Vauxhaul , Ford, Nissan you name it), scored 2 or moire. Like I say the AR6 if you look on Google was a very modern replacement for the Metro in the late 80's but there was no funding to go through and BAE didn't want to do it and there was no other player who'd step in, even the Metro here was a very modern car in it's day when it was launched minus the ageing A-Series engine and companion 4-speed sump mounted gearbox (problem was until the new Rover K-Series came out which had head-gasket troubles of it's own the A-Series couldn't accomodate a 5th gear which by the late 80's everyone else had as standard or as an option). However packaging wise and drivability for new learners were very good).
Another issue was rust=proofing which is weird cause the Allegro which was still in production in 1980 didn't seem to rust badly at all though all early 80's small cars rusted badly the Metro was specially prone to it without proper waxoiling care.
Like I say we had the ability and the desire but under the top brass things that should've been done weren't, so they only have themselves to blame.
Piece of junk in a fur coat lol lol lol rot box motor trade nickname for the metro was Metrot
We like them!
Crap when it was new and crap now
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What a horrid car
it's funny how car's we didn't like a few years ago ,is the car's we like now
+Ian Gibbons The Metro had a hard act to follow after the success of the Mini
+KGF Classic Cars true but not many people liked them
Ian Gibbons - Oh Dear! They were a big seller and popular with the Driving Schools and they were part of the street furniture all over the country back then so hardly not many people liked them.
The worse thing about the metro was how a drove. Taking life in your hands on a motorway.