I missed the edit window, but wanted to add:
In the 1980s when every auto maker was switching to front wheel drive, I seem to remember the main advantage they touted was the superior traction in rain and snow. But IMO the biggest advantage was the more efficient use of space: FWD allows for more interior space in a smaller car since you don’t have the transmission and drive shaft taking space from the interior.
My 1986 Dodge Charger did the same thing. The dealer’s mechanics could do nothing about it, they suggested I warm it up longer (didn’t work). A shade tree mechanic in my hometown was able to fix it temporarily, but after a few weeks, it was back to stalling at every turn or stop for the first 15-20 minutes.
hate to tell you, but your dad’s '57 Chevy was a piece of junk too. it just had a lot of chrome and was painted in nice colors.
I saw a vinyl sticker on the front windshield of a car today: STÜCK SCHEISSE.
Dad’s was a Slant Six. There’s no doubt in my mind that the emissions controls (which were pretty half-baked in 1974) were responsible for a lot of that car’s driveability problems.
I drove it when I was 16 and 17, when it was about 10 years old. I was too irresponsible to be interested or involved with any problems it may have had, I just liked driving it. It did have problems, but my Dad didn’t believe in proper maintenance so every car he ever owned was unreliable and needed work pretty much all the time.
So you’re not dashing any of my memories. My expertise with things automotive consists solely of changing tires, but considering how fondly my generation felt about 57 Chevies, I’ve always assumed they must have been great cars. Please feel free to set me straight, I’m genuinely curious.
I once owned a Renault Encore. The “Car Talk” guys ridiculed them to the very end of their show.
I’ve been a Nissan Sentra girl ever since, and will buy them as long as they keep making them.
Ironically, Renault owns a significant share of Nissan now.
1987 Jeep Cherokee. My GOD! that was the worst truck I have ever owned. I bought it used with 40K miles on it from a freaking kindegarten teacher. It was not abused in any way shape or form. I didn’t ask it to do much either. WAY too top heavy so the thing can be interesting if you try to corner. And off road… ha! good luck with that. So I didn’t, and kinda babied it. Drove it to the office and back home - that type of thing. But it died at 87K! The main problem was the water pump - it would constantly over heat. It seems to me Chrysler put the same water pump in the V8’s as they did in the V6’s. That is a huge design flaw. I went through three water pumps before I just decided, fuck you Chrysler, and sold it for scrap.
To this day I will never buy a Chrylser.
I can compare this to other SUV’s I’ve had and it whoafully comes up short. Currently I drive I 2017 Tacoma, but before that I had a Nissan Pathfinder. I also bought that from a scoolteacher, oddly enough, and it did just fine. Traded it in because it was just old (140K miles). Before that I had this beast of a fucked up Ford Explorer which was oddly wonderful. Old, abused, and it’s transmission finally died. But wow, I was using that thing, which was roughly the size and weight of the Cherokee, to pull backhoes out of sand and shit. It’s not even close to rated for that! Worked it harder than the proverbial rented mule. But it did it everything I asked, as demanding as that was and it still lasted longer than that P.O.S Cherokee.
In short, I will never buy a jeep again.
I replaced the '73 Commando with a '90 Cherokee. I’ll admit its ‘Not too bad’, which is high praise indeed for a Jeep.
I off-road exclusively with it, and it does okay, once I fixed the front axle nonsense correctly. It’s completely un-road-worthy, however. Anything above 25 mph and it shakes so violently it would disintegrate in short order. But I blame the off-road abuse for that. It only shook a little when I bought it. 
That would be a toss-up between the late 60s Opal Cadet and the '87 (I think) Pontiac Sunbird. Both were horrible cars and absolutely unreliable. You never knew if either one would get you around the block and they both had problems with the basic systems like starting and stopping.
I suspect that as bad as the Sunbird was (and the dealer was a crook. too), the all time winner of crappy cars in our immediate family was most likely the Opal. My husband’s sister had bought it new in Northern Indiana and it wouldn’t even remain tuned up for long. Eventually, and I know this sounds crazy but it’s true, the dealer actually refunded half the purchase price to my SIL and she promptly gave it to my husband with the understanding that she would not be responsible for anything else. At one point my husband pulled the engine and replaced the valves. Later on he replaced the clutch, too. At one point we noticed we could see the ground rushing by through holes in the bottom of the car around the driver’s seat. One day, as we came to a stop in back of my parents’ house my husband was suddenly sitting a whole lot lower as the driver’s seat had fallen through the bottom of the car. He propped it up on a couple of boards and got rid of it as soon as he could.
Now the Sunbird-what a delight. When we drove it off the lot there was a hole in the firewall and the interior got very wet. It was a nightmare right off the bat. We kept it for over nine years and I would have watched it get crushed if I could. Did NOT miss that car at all.
My father gave me his '91 Buick Regal. It was white, which was appropriate, because the only thing missing was it being called a Buick Elephant. Lovely car when it worked, but nothing worked; everything on it broke with truly astounding regularity. Despite not having that many miles on it, the car was in a perpetual state of breaking. It was like a banana, always a day from rotting; I think it might actually have been made of banana. Rather than taking it to the auto shop, I should have simply paid a mechanic to live in the backseat and repair it as it went; it would have been cheaper and more convenient.
My Dad had replaced it with a Buick LeSabre, and even more lovely car but it broke down constantly, too.
After two years I glumly realized that had I simply spent the repair money on a new car, I’d have spent the same money and had a reliable car. I took the Regal to a garage for the last time, told the mechanic he could keep it, and went and bought a Hyundai, which I drove for five years and 200,000km and never had to do anything to except change the oil.
There’s a song for that.
My parents had a late 70’s Plymouth station wagon. I don’t remember the model, but it was a true lemon, and I learned a lot from Dad’s stories about it.
It always ran poorly, and my father (a very good shade tree mechanic) took it to the dealer many times. Dad knew it was something about the carburetor. No matter how often they took it apart, they never found the problem. My dad finally took it apart himself, and found that most of the vents were blocked with mold flashing. Which told him they never took the carburetor apart when they claimed they did. He was able to clean it out with a pocket knife, but by then the car was toast.
I learned not to buy Plymouth, be careful of domestic cars (they had Toyotas when I learned to drive), and be skeptical of dealership service departments.
It’s a toss-up for our most awful car: I had a 1990’s Nissan Sentra Wagon. My parents bought it used when I graduated college and needed a car for work. The car died on day one as I was leaving the grocery store with the family’s groceries. The dealer replaced the alternator, but I found that wasn’t the problem. The car had vacuum leaks that no mechanic was ever able to fix.
Then there was the used Suzuki Sidekick. I had never named a car before, but that car was Lucy. Short for Lucille, as in You picked a fine time to leave us. The computer died right when a friend I hadn’t seen for years was going to be nearby and we were going to have dinner with her. (One-in-a-million problem, I’ve been told. Twice.) The previous owners (guaranteed by friends that they took good care of the car) had lost the owners manual and told us that to go from 2-wheel to 4-wheel drive, just shift the lever. Not one mention about wheel hubs. Once we got that fixed, it ran well for a couple of years until it developed vacuum leaks.
I hope I never need to buy a used car again.
Littlest R recently clarified this point (at a family gathering where we met her future in-laws; how time flies)–she actually got three 85mph+ tickets in the Camry. 
ex wife had a Renault Alliance. It was falling apart at 30k miles. Knew a guy who gave his away to strangers for free
I had a 80’s Chevy Cavalier that I drove around in the mid 90’s. I was going down the road and the engine fell out and knocked out my steering. Thankfully I wasn’t going too fast and the car gently slid to the side of the road (instead of on-coming traffic). So yeah, the car that could have killed me makes the list. I will not drive a Chevy to this day.
Oddly enough, the best car I ever had in terms of the sheer love I had for it was a new 1977 Chevrolet Caprice. It was the first year of a beautiful new total redesign, and I bought it because I had decided that sports cars weren’t for me, and traded in a 280Z for it. I was just a kid and the Caprice was a Cadillac-like old man’s car, but the understated quiet elegance was exactly what I wanted at the time. Such inclinations of wild youthfulness as I occasionally had were quite adequately satisfied by its powerful V8. It was normally so quiet you could hardly tell the engine was running, but a hard press on the accelerator would turn this creature of sedate luxury into a roaring beast. It had everything!
Anyway, I digress. The worst car I ever had, also purchased new, was a piece of shit Ford Maverick. Among other things, the engine would periodically have fits of coughing and sputtering because Ford didn’t yet have their act together with the new emission control requirements, it had various fit and finish problems, and best of all, the POS started to rust after less than six months! I think this would have been covered under warranty, but I was so fed up by then that I just traded it in to get rid of it.
So, much like the previous poster’s aversion to Chevy, I’ve had an aversion to Ford products ever since having to endure this piece of junk, though I fully realize that a great many years have passed and they make some good stuff these days. But I will never forgive Ford for ruining at least six months of my youth when I should have been enjoying a new car instead of cursing it.
Been enjoying rereading this thread. A lot of crappy cars out there. I recall a piece of junk that my sister and her husband had; it was a 1960s Studebaker Lark. They called it “The Stupidbaker”. Underpowered, ugly, and totally inappropriate for Alaskan winters.
My mom let me use her crap-brown '78 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Brougham. It was the classier version of the Cutlass Supreme by way of the fake leather exterior over the rear seats. I got to use that in high school - we could get 3 people in the front bench seat and another 4 or so in the back seat. The car leaked oil all the time and had horrible gas mileage. She sold it to someone happy to take it off her hands and last we heard it was getting restored and probably ended-up as a low-rider. Never trusted a GM product again.
My first car of my own was a tan '85 Renault Encore 4-door (“The One to Watch!”) which my parents purchased for me from Enterprise car sales in order to get to and from college and my job. Very POS-worthy car with no power and a crappy automatic transmission that refused to downshift. Got rid of that car after getting my first job following college (a Toyota pickup - which was bomb-proof and a relief to own something that was reliable).