A couple or three years ago there was a guy who showed up at the Northwest Motorfest in Boise with an original-looking Metropolitan that had a Datsun 1600 L-16 motor and trans in it. Made a very neat setup, and I'm sure it ran better than the orginal motor and trans. It was my favorite car in the show that year.
When I was in high school, we called the Metros "Lois Lane cars" because the actress who played Lois Lane in the old Superman tv show of the 1950's drove one in the show. Noelle Neill was her name if I remember correctly. Anyway, they were sort of cute little buggers in the same way a mongrel dog is cute sometimes. They were absolutely gutless and handled like a drunken pig, but they did get good gas mileage. With 25 to 30 cent a gallon gasoline, you could literally run the things on pocket change in those days.
