A used 1983 Renault Alliance. Supposedly “Car of the Year,” but you couldn’t convince me. I had to have the clutch replaced about five or six times in the two or three years I had the car. No air conditioning either, and I live in the DC area. I was so happy to finally get rid of that thing.
1991 Subaru Justy (2 wheel drive one). I still own it. Runs great, looks like hell though. I should say it is only running by the grace of God though. The tranny got stuck in reverse and i drove it 30 miles (in reverse) to my friend’s house where i replaced the tranny. Then the oil seals became leaky and the motor seized. I unseized it. Now i put syntec in to keep the seals swollen. Then a coolant line burst and it was driven for about 4 months before i realized that the temperature wasn’t broken at all.
It’s hella fun to drive though, and i get a lot of funny looks from people when they see me and my friend in it while we were these ugly hippy wigs in a little white car that looks like a bathtub on wheels with 30 air freshners hanging all over the interior.
I’ve only owned two cars in my life, and fortunately I haven’t had one that was a piece of shit from the start, so the best I can do to contribute to this thread is to explain what happened to my first car when it approached the end of its life cycle.
The car was a 1988 Toyota Corolla. I bought it in 1994 with 63,000 miles on it. The car ran well for several years and it got good gas mileage. Around spring of 2001 it suddenly began having several problems all at once. The AC stopped working, the engine was getting hot after just driving it four miles to work. The gas mileage was constantly decreasing (it was getting 25 MPG in the city, but this had dropped to 16 on the last tank I filled in it). When the mechanic looked it over he gave me a $2300 estimate for repairing it and two pages listing all the things he found that needed to be fixed on it. Clearly, it was time to trade it in, and so I did, with nearly 121,000 miles on the odometer.
My sister had a 1986 Ford Mustang that gave her nothing but trouble. I don’t remember all the things that went wrong with it, but it was stubborn to start and it accelerated slowly. She was very glad to dump that heap of garbage.
Amen, to that.
My first new car was a 1984 Renault Alliance. I had an automatic with a/c. It ran fine for 4 years (length of loan).
The day after I sent my last payment all sorts of shit went wrong.
Alternator fried, blinker module cooked. A/C lost all it’s freon…
CAR OF THE YEAR my ass!
My first car was a red 1979 Ford Pinto. It was embarassingly goofy looking. It was a hatchback, and the back seat folded down, leaving plenty of room for some hot high school lovin’, though…
Chevy Cavalier Z-24
Hey, you bustin’ on my Beltway? 
Your statement is exactly why in 1991 I got rid of my Mercury Lynx LN-7 (which I loved, but it was on its last legs) for my brother’s Chevrolet Cavalier Z-24. It had a fuel-injected 3.2 liter engine and when you stepped on the gas, that puppy would get up and run! I desperately needed that for negotiating the treacherous interstate highway system between my hometown Beltway and the weirdness that is driving in New York, where I was living at the time. I once, under controlled conditions, topped it out at over 135 mph - pretty blinking impressive for a car that turned out to be junk.
Thing is, the Cavalier is nothing more than an aerodynamic Chevette (a Mr. Goodwrench told me this). Worse yet, it had more electrical failures than the power grid in the Northeast last Thursday. And it was always some esoteric, expensive microchip controller on top of some part deep in the engine that went up, necessitating dropping the transaxle or some other such VERY expensive repair. :mad:
What compounded the problem was I had to have the engine replaced at 70K miles. Seems Purolator listed the wrong replacement oil filter in the catalogs you find at local auto parts stores and the like. The Purolator filter I used was 2 inches longer than the filter that was on there, which wasn’t an issue until I slid on wet, leafy pavement into the corner of a sidewalk that, when the car went over the curb, the curb struck the oil filter (little did I know) that projected below the protection of the car’s frame and the oil proceeded to pump out the open seam over the next 15 miles. My insurance company very graciously :rolleyes: replaced my engine with a junk engine whose #1 cylinder had a leak where the threads for the spark plug mount were completely stripped. My insurance company said “too bad” about the crummy engine, and Purolator said, in essence, “you shouldn’t have trusted our catalog” when I contacted them about the error in their catalog that cost me an engine.
I ditched this expensive bit of hell on wheels when it was costing me as much per month in repairs as a car payment on a new car. I swore I would never buy a Chevy or GM car again, until a dealer friend showed me the Geo Prizm, and convinced me it was a rebadged Toyota Corolla. I’ve had that car for eight years, 120,000 miles, and only one minor repair.
I’ll still never buy another GM car…
1974(?) VW Schiroco (did I spell that right?). I paid $400 for it in south Georgia, and drove it from Atlanta to Tampa a couple times. Among it’s many problems…
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On the first arrival to Tampa, the Alternator went ($350). I’d owned the car less than a week.
On the first return to Atlanta (during a really bad March rainstorm, the windshield wiper died (not a typo - there was only one wiper mounted in the center of the windshield). Fortunately, I was only about 10 miles from home :eek:
Did I mention the tires were as bald as bologna?
Also during that hair-raising ride through downtown Atlanta, I learned that the car leaked profusely. Fortunately, the floorboards were in such bad shape that the water just flowed right back out. It was scary, though, because in addition to the water coming through the sunroof, and from all around the windshield, it was leaking into the dashboard, so all the guages had a sort of fishtank look.
Speaking of floorboards, you could actually see the ground through the holes in the floorboards while driving.
The first night I had it in Tampa, it sat in the parking lot of a Sears Service Center (awaiting the alternator repair), and someone broke into it, smashing the drivers’ side wing window. The perpetrator stole my crappy, $25 CB Radio, tearing out the power cord in the process, rendering it useless anyways - not that it was worth anything to begin with. So, the three months I drove it, I had to put layers of plastic trash bags on the drivers seat bacause not only was it always soaked (being leaky to begin with, and it rained almost every day in Tampa, and now there was a broken window, but also: I couldn’t for the life of me vacuum all the glass out of the upholstery). I guess the car was built before safety glass was discovered, so the glass just shattered and exploded into millions and millions of tiny shards.
I never registered or insured it the whole time I owned it, nor did I ever have a legal title or any proof of ownership. The guy I bought it from told me he’d mail me the paperwork, but never did. As I ended up in South Florida, and my only transprotation was this deathtrap, and I’d misplaced the “Bill of sale” he’d made me (his information was indeciferable anyways, IIRC), I never ponied up the courage to drive back to his house. I never got pulled over in it, though, in the four total months I drove it.
I sold the VW for $10 when I went back to Atlanta.
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I’ve owned a couple of the cars mentioned here (82 Nissan Sentra that was, indeed, indestructable, and a 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 - a behemoth).
My worst was a 1978 (IIRC) Mustang II. Orange (!) and black. Just a nightmare. A rolling nightmare.
No fears, Taoiseach! I love Baltimore – my dad’s family are from there, and part of the reason for the trip was to open the Mini up on a nice, fast, fun motorway – the person with me wasn’t so thrilled, but it was great, zipping along, shouting, ‘Look! Perring Parkway! Get out of my way! Oooh, Joppa Road! Every day on this bloody road, and you still miss the exits! Ooooh, Harford Rd! &c’
Mmm…how well I remember from long, long ago trips…
I had a 1983 Cavalier (the car that replaced the Red Wonder), and it was a good wee car, but its cylinders knocked from day one…it didn’t have the acceleration necessary for I-95 or the Beltway…Finally gave up on the Cav when, years after I had been a in a crash, I discovered that the seal around the hood had been compromised in the crash and not restored properly – I wrecked in 1985, and was fortunate for the next 6 yrs or so either to park in a shed or pointing downhill on the street – when I moved to my current house, it was parked level…imagine MY surprise the morning I went out after a heavy rainstorm, opened the car door, and water poured out like a cartoon…I half expected to see fish flopping on the ground. Never could get it dried out, and everything inside kept shorting out, and the upholstery got damp, mildewed, yuck.
Back to the topic – the very day my partner sent in the last payment for his 1991 Beretta, was the day he had it towed to have the engine replaced – turns out that when they installed the engine, they turned the bolts so tightly that over the years, the stress cracked the engine block…
On the positive side, he did have a new engine dropped into it, and when he sold it 3 weeks ago, it had over 200,000 miles on it, and still ran well (he didn’t need it and knew someone who needed a car.)
A Ford Grenada. It was so rusted that you could have put your feet through the floorboards. But hey it was my first car!