Automatic Door Locking

[STEELDAVE]

I had that problem with my 94, never locked me out, but would piss the hell off of me every time I would try to open the doors and assume they were unlocked and then...whiff!!!! I cut the wires that go into the door, from the sides of the dash and problem solved.

[leonbentz]

I agree with geojim. I would just remove the darned things. The less "automatic" stuff your car has, the better. Truthfully, I didn't know about the automatic locking doors, until seeing this thread. I thought Geo Metros are supposed to be economy cars. Holy shit!! Economy ars aren't supposed to go to that extreme, with options! I do like my AC and Automatic transmission, though. As far as the automatic locking doors go, I would 86 it. No one will ever try to take my car, simply because if anyone came up to jack it, They only would have to see how ugly I am and run the other way.


"way" junked a Metro at 120k?? Wow, that's low miles, for a Metro. I hoped you pulled the runnin' gear and dropped it in a crisp, clean new Metro. At 200k, mine still drives quite nice. I just replaced the lower control arms w/ball joints and not much has improved, so the buggers can run forever. I rebuilt the engine, 1200 miles ago (last month) and not much has improved either. It ran just as good, before the rebuild, but it was losing too much engine and transmission oil. I had to pull the engine, to replace the tranny seal and rear main seal, so I thought, what the heck. I pulled her down at 207,271 miles and everything looked good. The original compression rings measured out to .015 - .016 end gap, the bearings all looked to have normal wear and the little fart still had plenty of power, before I pulled it apart.

now, it looks as though I may take a new job, 46.42 miles from home and I'll really give this thing the endurance test.

[Woodie83]

The locking doors are a safety thing. There was a loophole in the airbag law that allowed them to not install airbags if the car had passive seatbelts. They mounted the seatbelts on the door so that you could leave them latched and have them automatically wrap around you as you closed the door. Never mind that it was extremely awkward to get your leg in there threading it between the belt and the seat. Fortunately they worked perfectly as conventional belts if you just unlatched them. Anyway, the government complained that the doors might pop open in a crash defeating the whole thing, Suzuki just added the auto locking doors and got a couple more years out of that setup before the '96 safety regs erased the loophole and mandated airbags.