I was driving an old Buick for a while when I was in high school. I had the hood fly up while driving also. Luckily, I was on a regular road (busy, but I’d rather be there than on freeway). Even more luckily, it was the type of hood that raised straight up about a foot and then tilted forward, so instead of driving down the road with hood over the windshield, it was a bit closer to this.
I bought my first car in 1980, it was a ‘79 metallic blue with white interior Chevrolet Monza Spyder hatchback. Small block 305 V8. So pretty and sounded so sweet. My mom co-signed the loan for me.
I kept up on the maintenance and all the work was done at the local shop down the corner.
One day in 1984 while driving all of a sudden flames shot out of the hood near the windshield and smoke was everywhere. The FD was called and put out the fire. I can’t recall the insurance details but they paid for a rental car and my car was sent to a shop for a replacement wiring job. I was told iirc that a main battery wire was pinched during some repair and caused the fire. After I picked it up ( it took weeks) the carburetor got stuck open and was spraying gasoline in the engine compartment. But another fire was avoided.
Within a week I was at the Volvo/VW dealer trading it in for a new Rabbit GTI. I didn’t know how to drive a manual but I learned quick!
A crack in my windshield washer line meant that they also worked as an engine washer.
In 1980 I owned a '69 Dodge Dart. One extremely humid/ rainy night the parked car attempted to start itself. No key in ignition.
I had a hood fly up on an Opel Kadet station wagon, happened on the freeway. All of a sudden what’s behind you becomes really Important. And my wife had a squirell chew through some of her wiring. Turns out there was a trend of using soy-based insulation.
I had a car alarm that worked perfectly fine for a year, up until I accidentally left the lights on overnight and killed the battery. Once I jump started my car to work again though suddenly the car alarm became the most sensitive thing in the world. A car drives through my neighborhood too fast? Car alarm goes off. Rains too heavily? Car alarm goes off. I’m actually driving and a heavy truck drives next to me? Car alarm goes off. Cat jumps on my hood? Car alarm goes off.
It was impossible to turn the car alarm off too, had to get the whole thing removed.
Went to get in the car a few weeks ago, the TPMS comes on indicating the LF tire is low. Immediately drive over to the gas station to the air pump where it takes…a pound. Hmmm. Get my gauge out of the glove compartment & it matches. Drive off; it doesn’t reset so I pull into another gas station/air pump some miles down the road. Again it doesn’t really need any air. I just figure the TPMS sensor has gone bad as I now have three gauges basically matching within one PSI. Drive to her house & the next day when she walks outside she notices my left rear tire is low.
The sensor was accurate but they never reset them when they rotated the tires. D’Oh!
(in my defense, this is the only car I’ve owned where it tells you which tire is low; the others only let me know that a tire is low so you’d check them all to figure out which one it was)
About a year ago I had someone drive into the back of me, badly damaging my car. It got towed to the menders, and my insurer advised that I could track the progress of the repair on line. Here’s a screenshot, from when the repair was all but complete:
As you can see the completion date isn’t guaranteed; so a couple of days before the due date I called the garage doing the repair to confirm the date. Their reaction? The car had been sitting in an off-site lot since they received it and they had not been authorized to work on it.
I called my insurer to request that they - uh - clarify. A day or so later they confirmed that the car was a write-off. Go (as we used to say) figure.
j
Well, there was that infamous date display on my old 2003 Hyundai Santa Fe, which didn’t quite know when February ended during leap years.
My 2010 Honda Fit is one of the Honda and Acura vehicles on which the navigation system resets to 1pm, January 1, 2002 on restart. It’s supposed to be caused by a bit counter issue and will reset itself in August (though from what I read, the date will still be wrong).
That’s interesting, as my 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee did almost exactly the same thing with its factory stereo/CD player. It was a once-a-month issue. And yours and mine are far enough part in model years to be practically entirely different vehicles.
ETA: I’d just leave mine alone for 5-10 minutes, and it would start working. I did notice that if I made sure to turn my radio OFF before shutting off the vehicle, the problem didn’t occur nearly as often.
a friend had a old Lancia and the driver seat came off the rails as he was going around a curve.
I’ve owned Jeeps. There is nothing unusual anymore.
A small list: Neutral safety switch (bypassed it), flywheel position sensor (unplug, wait and replug), fuel pump (put gas in the windshield washer bottle, use that pump to get home), distributer drive gear (keep lots of spares, repair on the trail with a rock and a nail), U-joint failed (dropped shaft and drove home on the front wheel drive only) and on and on and on…
But this one always baffled me… while going up a SPECIFIC trail, at a SPECIFIC spot, the Jeep would suddenly quit. Just about every time. It would always restart, but what the fuck??? Turns out it was the stoopid rod that runs from the ignition switch down the steering column. The angle of the side-hill and corner you had to make right there strained the whole system and would pull the rod just enough to break contact. Since then, had to abandon the entire ignition/key setup (for other reasons) and it’s never happened again. The ‘ignition’ is the rod you pull by hand, then push a switch down on the console. The key just hangs there because I have the coolest key-chain Mascot. A leather Dachshund! Nobody will ever be able (or willing I’m sure) to steal this Jeep unless they tow it away!
Ford Truck: Once had the little stupid fan thingy on the alternator pully split in half. This caused a HUGE vibration at normal speed, but you could drive about 30 mph. It was dark, and I didn’t realize what happened. Had a serpentine belt, so I couldn’t just disco the alt and haul ass, but had I seen that, could maybe have tried to break off the other half. So, limped home for 200 miles. (Sunday night, middle of nowhere)
In 1989, I was driving with my then girlfriend in her father’s Opel Ascona (the most boring car you can imagine) from Westphalia, Germany to St. Cyprien in South-Western France. After about 250 km, somewhere on the Autobahn near Karlsruhe, the gas pedal got stuck in full throttle. This was just before entering a construction site with a speed limit of 60 kph and narrowed lanes (some of you might know how narrow these lanes are on the Autobahn). So I instantly shifted intro neutral and later shifted down to control the speed during the drive through the construction area. It was bit freaky and dangerous anyway. Fortunately, there was a rest stop a few kilometers later, so we could stop and check the issue. This Ascona of course still was a carburetor model, so after opening the hood it quickly became clear that the recoil spring for the throttle cable had been overstretched. Fortunately, my girlfriend’s father had a well-equipped tool box in the trunk including a wire cutter, and we were able to shorten the spring, cut off the overstretched part and reinstall it. The gas pedal became very hard to apply and it wore out our right feet, but it worked for another 2.500 km to get to South France and back to Germany.
I knew I guy in high school who did exactly the same thing. IIRC the drive shaft failed (or maybe it was the U-joint like yours and I misunderstood). So he just put it in 4WD and just drove around in “front wheel drive”. He never actually fixed it, so he always called it the “front wheel drive Jeep” from then on.
I too am eagerly awaiting the arrival of August to see what happens next with my calendar/clock display.
Back when I had a Dodge Caravan it had a strange but minor quirk. If driven only a short distance in cold weather and parked for a few minutes, like from my house to the donut shop, the speedometer needle would flail around when it was starting. Not a big problem until one day it flailed around so wildly that it pinned itself on the wrong side of the stop pin at “0”. So as I drove, it would struggle against the pin and go nowhere, so I had no working speedometer.
I thought I’d have to take it in to the dealer and have the whole dash disassembled, but … internet to the rescue! It turns out that there is a magic sequence of button pushes that resets and recalibrates all the gauges (naturally, not documented in the manual). And it worked – the speedometer got reset!
Not really a problem, but on one of the cars if you turned on the defroster and rear hazard light flasher, then signaled for a right turn (or maybe it was a left turn I forget), the radio would turn on and the volume would go up and down in time with the flasher. It was probably my 1972 Dodge Dart.
I cringe whenever someone talks about “winning” the thread, but…ahem…
I had a Volkswagen Rabbit. The floorboards were rusted through completely at the angle about where your heels sit.
I was driving with a friend in a rainstorm. I went through a puddle and both of us got a complete, forceful shower of rainwater while sitting enclosed within the vehicle. We were drenched.
mmm
My first vehicle, a 65 Ford F-100 would randomly drop the rod that actuated the clutch lever on the transmission into traffic. So, you’d press the clutch pedal, and it would go to the floor. I’d drag the truck to a stop somewhere, then go run out in traffic to retrieve the part, then reinstall it with a new cotter pin. After this happened a few times, I got smart and ran a wire around the rod and attached it to the frame. At least I wasn’t running around in traffic anymore.
A few months later I diagnosed that a different problem was being caused by a broken motor mount. After that was fixed, the clutch rod stopped falling out. Turns out the motor mount was letting the whole transmission/engine assembly shift relative to the trucks frame and slowly wearing through the cotter pin.
The same truck had an issue where when you turned the steering wheel a certain number of degrees left, it would honk. When you straightened the wheel out, it would stop. I never bothered fixing that one.