Weirdest Car of the Week: a Geo Metro with a V8 where the back seat went

Every Friday we pick the Weirdest Car of the Week from Cars & Bids. This week's winner is not subtle.

A Metro that stopped economizing

The 1996 Geo Metro Mid-Mounted V8 Swap sold on Cars & Bids on November 2, 2026, at 2:49 p.m. CST for $16,000 after 42 bids. The listing puts it in North Hollywood, California, with a clean Illinois title, a red exterior, a gray interior, and 21,900 miles shown on a five-digit odometer.

From the factory, a second-generation Metro was GM and Suzuki's idea of thrift: a tiny hatchback with a front-mounted 1.0-liter inline-three and front-wheel drive. This one had that hardware yanked. In its place, according to the seller and the listing, sits a mid-mounted General Motors LS4 5.3-liter V8 and a four-speed automatic, sending power to the rear wheels.

Where the back seat used to be

You can see the joke from across a parking lot. The rear wheel arches are flared out with air intakes, the rear bumper has holes cut into it, and the back seats are gone so the engine and a rear firewall can live there instead. The listing also notes Cadillac DeVille-sourced 16-inch rear wheels, a sunroof, aftermarket oil-pressure and fuel gauges, a battery relocated behind the passenger seat, and a Chevrolet badge up front. The seller bought it in 2021 and has added about 100 miles since.

Cars & Bids calls it street-legal and titled for road use in Illinois. The seller also warns, fairly, that the modifications may not pass emissions testing in some states. That is the buyer's problem, and also the whole personality of the car.

Why this is Weirdest Car of the Week

Plenty of people LS-swap Miatas, trucks, and even kei cars. Stuffing a transverse FWD LS into a Metro by deleting the rear cabin and turning a grocery-getter into a mid-engine hatchback is a different category of commitment. The stock photo on this page is a 1995 Geo Metro hatchback from Wikimedia Commons, for model reference only; it is not the auction car. For the actual flared, scoop-fed, V8-backed example, go look at the Cars & Bids listing.

Sixteen thousand dollars for a one-off Metro that can embarrass its own EPA sticker is, frankly, a bargain for this much wrong. Welcome to the Quirk Database.

Want to know what one actually costs? The Geo Metro Mid-Mounted V8 Swap Quirk Database entry logs real auction sold prices, each linked to its result.