With all the junkyard visits I make, I get to view all manner of money-saving repairs performed by the final owners of soon-to-be-scrapped vehicles. Some are ugly but probably not so dangerous, some are fairly ingenious (if impractical)... and some are profoundly bad ideas. This is the latter sort of zero-dollar repair: a quarter-million-mile 2001 Chevrolet Metro LSi sedan with a deployed-airbag problem "solved" with tape and recklessness.
The Metro was a tiny Suzuki-built car, the successor to the 1986-1988 Chevrolet Sprint. For most of its 1989-2001 sales run, it bore Geo badges in the United States, but became a Chevrolet when the Geo brand got the axe after 1997. The final model year was 2001, and the sedan was the only configuration available that year (if you wanted a two-door, you could get its Suzuki-badged twin, the Swift).
Granted, a 22-year-old Chevy Metro that crashed hard enough to deploy the airbags doesn't have much resale value, but this "repair" just seems like a very bad idea. The driver's-side bag has been stuffed back into the steering wheel and the torn plastic shards taped over the whole mess, while the passenger-side bag appears to have been corralled into a brown paper bag and then taped (somewhat) into its housing.
Since it appears that a junkyard-obtained front bumper was installed in place of the presumably mangled original one, this car's final owner must have been willing to spend something on the car.
