Vegas have been mentioned a few times, but I’ve got to say that I had a (the only?) good one. Bought a used 1975 Vega with 20K miles on it. It was the bright red wagon version. That was the first year for electronic ignition, which helped quite a bit. I drove it in Chicago for several years and it got along fine in the snow, even though I had to bring the battery in at night to make sure it started in the morning.
I put an additional 60K miles on it and the engine began to lose compression. It still ran, but not as well. I sold it for $1000 less than I paid for it, so I think I did well.
Nice car “on paper” as it was almost plush compared to the other unabashedly spartan VWs of the era, and pretty good looking. Factory chrome wheels, even FM radio. Even had an auto trans. Fuel injected too: the computer that controlled it looked a like a big, sealed sardine can. Must have been very nice when new, and fancy-schmancy for a VW.
Lots of trouble in the late 70s though. engine difficult to maintain through the hatch in the flat rear floor too. 50 dollars to buy a set of ignition points ( “horseshoe points” ) Never felt comfortable taking it more than a dozen miles from home by the time I got rid of it.
Man, these are great stories. Well, entertaining stories. I’m one of those people that, if I don’t have a reliable car I get panic attacks. Being stranded on the side of the road is a genuine fear of mine.
I brought this up with my dad and he reminded me of this ancient Dodge van we had when I was a kid. You know, the kind favored by today’s pedos. It broke down on us while traveling along I-5, and I remember being told to go sit in the grass a few dozen yards away from the edge of the road while dad crawled under it to fix whatever was wrong. I think that’s when he started buying Japanese cars, something he’s been doing ever since.
I had a '73 Pinto and it was a dream car compared to what it replaced - a 1969 Galaxie 500. I was supposed to inherit a Galaxie 500 convertible, but my brother let a friend of his drive it (he wasn’t supposed to) and she got into a crash. Somehow this led to it catching fire upon starting at regular intervals. It finally really died in front of our house. I got the other one to replace it.
It always needed $100 in repairs. When I brought it to Cambridge, someone really, really wanted to steal it. They’d get in, scoop out the ignition, and find that they were blocked by a steering lock. After I replaced the ignition once I wired a toggle and push button into the glove compartment to let me start it without another $100 repair. (Still needed the key to unlock steering). Finally someone towed it, and pulled off all the metal, and I cheered. That’s when I got the Pinto. Whose engine was fine. And no one tailgated me.
Most useless and frustrating car by proxy would be the 1959 Dodge in which my father drove the family on a summer vacation.
It broke down on the way home, on a Sunday in the wilds of Pennsylvania with no open service station within many miles (obviously no cellphone, no Triple-A, and my father had to be back at work the next day so holing up someplace until a station with a mechanic reopened was not an option).
We would up having my uncle push us at a snail’s pace in his Buick Special all the way home (no tow rope to be had), which did not do wonders for the Buick’s front end or the Dodge’s back end. Given the snarly adult tempers which this dreadful incident aroused, even I as a young child knew to STFU.
1980 Chevy Citation. Lemon from the time I drove it off the sales lot. It was a manual that was almost impossible to shift at a normal rate; the driver needed to wait about 2 seconds to be able to actually engage the next gear selection. It leaked like a 50’s British motorcyle, and was unfixable even after 3 trips to the dealer. However, the interior layout was great for its time. Roomy for all passengers, and a decent trunk for a car in its size class. I put up with it for one year, and then purchased a Datsun (now Nissan)
Haven’t had an American branded car since then…but I have had Ford and Chevy trucks, which were dependable.
My sister’s '74 Fiat X1/9 was a poor performer. Especially after I crashed it into a tree. While her roommate was, er, pleasuring me. Yeah, I should have stopped first. But that gutless wonder’s steering was sloppy anyway.
In addition to the 73 Pinto, I also inherited a '74 Dodge Dart. This was one of the first years of emission controls and they did not get it right. I (and everyone else I know who had one) had to keep in a supply of spare ballast resistors, which was a little doodad you affixed under the hood when the car wouldn’t start. Most of the time, it fixed the problem.
It also refused to start if the outside temperature was 10 degrees F or lower. You could look at the outdoor thermometer and if it was that cold outside, just roll over and go back to bed. No use trying to get to work. This got me in big trouble one Christmas day when I was unable to show up as part of the skeleton crew on a large daily newspaper.
My father-in-law (who had gifted us with the Pinto) later gave us a Ford LTD (not sure what year). Nicknamed the LSD a/k/a The Love Boat. My most enduring memory of the Love Boat was attempting to jack it up in a muddy driveway to change a flat. Talk about “that sinking feeling.” There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, other than being a serious gas guzzler, and having a ridiculously “comfy” suspension that gave you no feeling whatsoever of actually being in touch with the road.
Similar to others in this thread, once I got past this difficult period in my life, I bought nothing but Toyotas.
The car I learned to drive on was a Plymouth Valiant. But I think it must have been a late 60s model. Push button transmission. I drove the hell out of it. Don’t remember it stalling, though.
1959 Renault Dauphine: I cannot even begin to describe total POSiness of that thing, beginning with the fact that the water filler tube was adjacent to the gasoline filler tube and neither one was identified in English. I eventually gave it to a guy I didn’t really like.
A friend of mine has told me about the Dauphine he drove while he was a college student in Ireland in the 1980s. He has a number of stories about how unreliable and frightening it was to drive.
My Shinto/Pinto (mentioned in another thread) was horrid but my clan may have been the exception; all our 70s stuff was mechanically pretty reliable. They rotted to dust in 5 years but the engines and drive trains often lived on. And it wasn’t just the Fords (First On Rust Day) but across the brands. The absolute worse was a Colt; right around 3 the one fender started to show some rust. As I had always done I pulled out the sand blaster to start prepping it for a patch job ------ and blew right through the fender, the liner, and into the engine compartment. The foil I used under the putty was probably thicker than the fender. Forget body solder like I usually used; it would have melted the factory metal.
Luckily I never owned this, but several years ago my car (my mustang!) was rear-ended, and I was getting a rental after dropping my car at the body shop. The body shop said they would take care of the arrangements for the rental. I never did figure out if they dropped the ball, or if the rental place did, but whatever happened, they were unprepared for me. I got this VW Jetta (pretty sure). Gray. I don’t think it had power windows. Absolutely the most basic model you should get – no bells and whistles at all.
The rental guy was going over the usual, and told me there would be a fine if there was smoking in the car. I don’t smoke, but the car already smelled like something had died in it while smoking, so I don’t think they would have noticed.
This car had no get-up-and-go. I hated driving it instead of my car. I think it hated being driven. I don’t name different cars I own, but that rental I had for 4 days earned the name of Rain Cloud.
Had an early 90’s Chevy Astro. It leaked fluids like a new-born baby, and the door handles would shatter and break off one by one until the only way to enter the vehicle was through the back door.
I have been pretty lucky in the car department.
I’ve never owned a true lemon, although I have a penchant for driving clunkers. My first truck was a ’72 Chevy LUV. I bought it from a friend-of-a-friend who said it needed a timing chain. I asked him how he knew that, and he said “I can see it hanging out of the front of the engine.” I paid $200 for it. It turns out, the timing chain was the only thing not broken in the timing system. I scoured junkyards for several months getting parts for it, and ended up fixing it on my own - my first real car repair. It had 200 (or maybe 300) thousand miles on it when I got it (it only had a 100K odo). It didn’t have a front bumper, and I had no luck finding one, so I made one out of a 4x4. It had perpetual carburetor issues, but it ran. I drove it for several years, never washed it , and let kids use it for paintball target practice. It never had great oil pressure (the oil light used to flicker at idle), and one night, when I was driving it home, the engine made an impressive bang, followed by the sound of metal clanking underneath the truck. I coasted to a stop, opened the hood, and saw the timing chain hanging out of the front of the engine. I gave it to NPR, which probably was a net loss for them.
Funny you should mention that, my worst experience was a 2012 BMW 328, also a flat magnet. The car had run-flat tires, which no shop keeps in stock so a tire issue would take a week to fix while the tire was ordered (by mule, apparently). I had five flats in 13 months with that car, each time waiting a week for a new tire. I considered getting non run-flats (at a cost of $800 or so for a set), but the first time I got a flat I bought OEM insurance on the tires, at a very good price, so each tire replaced was almost free. But, Jesus, five weeks of disuse on an expensive car? And I didn’t like the car all that much: the 3-series now is the size of a 5-series car where before it was a small sporty sedan. And the 4 cylinder engine sounded like a sewing machine. I just did not like that car, and got rid of it after the fifth flat, but couldn’t be happier to be rid of it.
to be fair, they were crap in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s too. There was just no incentive to prioritize quality when the other companies were just as crappy. And when the foreign competition was from Europe which was mostly crap too. Corporate inertia/“big company disease” being what it is, they took too long to realize Japan was a threat, and even longer to understand why.