What was the worst car that you have ever owned, including your current car?
I have a somewhat funny story of mine…if this topic proves interesting.
(I did a search first…and this topic appears not to have been discussed recently.)
I drove a hand-me-down 1986 Mercury Lynx. By 1992, it was unable to go above 55 mph. It had no AC. I couldn’t roll down the driver’s side window. It finally gave its death gasp on the access road of a major highway within 1/2 mile of a Mazda dealership. I coasted into the dealership and traded it in.
The weird thing is, I saw the same car driving down the road almost a year later - same license plate, same dent in the rear fender. I also spotted the most recent car I traded in - I parked right next to it at a grocery store. Strange.
I almost said “Easy!” Then I realized, it’s really in tie. In high school I drove a 1980 AMC Eagle. It looked like a large insect, and it was dirty, brown(ish), ugly, and no matter what happened to it, it refused to die: thus its nickname, “The Cockroach.” This thing had broken a/c, broken tape player, paint peeling, overheated constantly (the freeway was a no-no), and had a tendency to vomit various fluids on friends’ driveways.
But probably the pooh-bah was my 1974 Chevy Impala I got in college. Now, it is really, really hard to hate the car because my father surprised me with it when I got back from my trip to Romania. I didn’t want to be, “::tsk!::: Daddy, I don’t like that car!” so I was honestly grateful and drove it in good health. My health, at least.
Let’s see…for starters, it was 18 1/2’ long and 6 1/2’ wide (I measured it!), with a blind spot the size of a Honda Civic. How did I learn that? Nearly side-swiping two different Civics on two different occasions, despite checking my blind spot. A cursory look, I learned, was not enough–I had to seriously crane my neck to see. The rear window was very small and made judging distance behind the car very hard to figure–I tapped a few cars parallel parking as a result (never any damage).
Now, that’s just the issues I had with it’s design. The car managed these disintegrations in the 2 years I owned it:
[li]Radiator blew; had to buy a new one[/li][li]Battery died; had to get new one[/li][li]Alternator died; got it replaced[/li][li]A/C compressor blew; was replaced[/li][li]Carburator screwed up; got new one[/li][li]Rear-view mirror popped off in my hand[/li][li]Engine fan came loose while I was driving and bounced around the engine, nearly chopping up the new radiator; got new fan clutch & assembly[/li][li]Starter went bad; sold it needing a new one[/li][li]Frickin’ AM RADIO went out. That’s all I had in the car, and even it managed to die. Grr![/li]
And the king of problems:
[li]After two months of driving, it cracked a gasket head. Radiator steam wound up pouring out of my exhaust pipe. Not good. The entire top of the engine had to be replaced, with a cost of $900–just in parts.[/li]
And my poor father felt so guilty that he did most of these repairs himself. The engine was one of the first things to go; watching him work in the garage on it (and getting angry with me when I told him it was okay, let’s take it in some where) was really difficult. Fortunately his doctor got through to him and demanded Dad not do any more work under the hood of the car.
The rest of the repairs we split together–he paid for a few, and lent me the money for some of the others before I could pay for them on my own. I really appreciate what he did; I was always grateful and frequently thanked him. He’s honestly ashamed of getting me that car, which I don’t exactly understand–the sentiment behind it was worth far more to me that the vehicle itself.
As much as went wrong with it, I must confess I have a bit of a soft spot for it in my memory.
This one’s easy for me. I had a Dodge Omni, fromt eh early 80’s I beleive. I think it started life with red paint, but someone painted it silver after that, then stenciled some sort of skull thing on the hood. After that, it was painted, with cans of spray paint mind you, a matte black. mostly. You could see through someof the uneven spots. The back window had been broken at some point and replaced with plexi-glass…badly. It had no radio, and I had to fix the shift linkage with a pin from a backpack frame and some wire. The brakes never really worked right, even after being replaced. I think it died from having a getting a big hole in the radiator and bleeding out. I think the head gasket cracked as a result too.
Oh yeah…the headlight mounts were pretty much gone too. I help them in place (more or less) with duct-tape and camping foam. Not to mention the destroyed front grille.
My first car, senior year of high school ('85). My stepdad scraped up enough to get me a '76 Subaru DL. The “rustbucket.” I could see the street through the floor. I kept thinking one time I would whomp down on the clutch and my foot would go clean through.
Oh, God, what else?[ul]
[li]A buddy and I had to push-start it every morning to get to school.[/li][li]The fan would never come on, so I had to wire a toggle switch through the dash.[/li][li]I never could get it to go into third gear.[/li][li]Moving to college (about a 12-hour drive), I had to stop about every hour to add coolant. Even so, it ran just below the red.[/li][li]Toward the end, the clutch burned up and the fender fell off from the rust.[/ul] In addition, I had to drive hunched up the car was so small (and I’m not particularly tall.)[/li]
I’ve probably repressed much more than I remember.
I ended up calling the salvage guy. Told him if he came to haul it off, we’d be square.
Truck, actually, for me.
Ford Courier - circa sometime in the late 70s and bought in the middle 80s, cheaply.
The first thing I did was drive the bucket of bolts to a shop and have the engine ‘adjusted,’ like valves tightened, timing set, mysterious loose wires connected up and things like that. However, it had this huge fuse box on the fender, connected to nothing, that held only one fuse – a big one. When I got the truck back from the shop, they had fixed everything – and even put a fuse in that fuse box, but it was still connected to nothing.
I never did figure that out.
The truck had a split, manual choke, that is, one cable went to the carb and one cable went to something else, both controlled by one pull on the dash.
The truck never ran right, it kept overheating in the summer if I got caught in slow traffic, the electric fuel pump went nuts and drove me nuts trying to find out why the carb kept flooding and cutting off the engine. Then one day as I was pouring over the open maw and working the linkage by hand as the engine sputtered, I saw this great piss stream of gas pour out of the jets and made the connection. I put a regulator on it and after having to make several adjustments on the thing, it ran kind of well.
It was rusty, had only an AM radio in it, hard seats, defrosters that tended to roast one out before clearing up the windshield, no air conditioning but an excellent heater. It steered about as easily as a tank, maybe harder with no power steering and a great, black steering wheel. The floors were rusty and had a few holes. The bed had been rusting since the day it rolled off of the assembly line and when it blew it’s muffler, it awoke whole neighborhoods at night.
I was a paper boy then and customers complained – so I put a glass pack on it and it almost sounded mean. It had big tires made out of rocks and was painted a crappy green. The anemic windshield wipers managed, in a rain storm, to get the rain drops off now and then. They had two speeds. Snail and slightly higher than snail.
I discovered the gas gauge was not accurate when I ran out of gas once.
I finally bought another car and sold the truck to some other sucker.
Can’t resist one tale…
While not the worlds worst car, my old 76 toyota corolla station wagon was sensitive. I cursed it out for stalling at an intersection one time. It didn’t start until my brother apologized to it. Then it started.
Promise.
Remember the Opel Kadett?
They were once sold through Buick dealers.
I had a Kadett in 1969…underpowered, trouble prone,
rustbucket and horrible.
A lot of people must have agreed. The car hasn’t been offered through Buick dealers for a l-o-n-g time.
I’ve loved every single car I’ve ever owned, except for one. I, too, was cursed with a '76 Toyota Corolla wagon (green). It wasn’t really my fault…it was part of the package deal that brought Mrs. ricepad, too, so I just had to take it. Gutless piece of shit, it was. Typical of Toyotas, it ran really well, as long as it was maintained regularly, but no matter what I did to it, it just would not go any faster or quicker.
My worst car was also my favourite car. It was a gold, 71 Parisienne and man that thing was a bomb!! My friends and I had so much fun roaming around it it and they used to laugh because I could barely be seen above the dashboard.
i never got to personally drive this car as it died way before i was old enough but it was a 1984 Blue Ford Escort that my grandfather got second hand for cheap. it always seemed to be at the dealers getting repaired…that’s about all i can remember of it…oh and the fact that it was blue…
When I was a senior in college my soon-to-be husband and I bought a very used VW fastback. It was an automatic and reverse gear didn’t work. I had to either park it on a hill (so I could roll back in neutral) or cruise the parking lots until I could find a pull-through space. We eventually stopped driving it and tried to abandon it but nobody took it. (People were smarter than we were apparently.) I don’t recall how we finally got rid of it, but we used our wedding gift money to buy a brand new Mazda GLC. That baby was cheap and bare-bones. Didn’t even have an AM radio, but we drove it forever and loved it.
I had one of them. Bought it the year I graduated from high school (1987) and it seemed like a really nice car at the time. By 1991 or so, it was a piece of shit. Consistently would die in the middle of nowhere, leaving me stranded. I hated that car. It was a piece of crap.
Metallic green piece of garbage that may well have been the worst automobile ever to roll off an American assembly line (and yes, I’m quite familiar with AMC’s contenders for that title).
My parents traded our 1969 Buick Skylark four-door for this instant jalopy at the beginning of the 1976 model year. The idea was, with gas prices being what they were, to get something newer that wouldn’t be needing continual maintenance and that was easier on gas (a smaller car with a V6 instead of the bigger, heavier, V8-equipped Skylark). Bad, bad move. The Dart was in the shop within a week to fish the tip of the dipstick out of the oil pan, it having broken off the first time my dad checked the oil. It had the most severe hesitation problem I’ve ever encountered; you didn’t accellerate so much as submit a request for accelleration that was attended to with the speed and efficiency characteristic of a Soviet bureaucracy in the high Stalin years. The armrests on the doors were merely pads wrapped in vinyl that was stretched over cleats in the door – in a matter of weeks the vinyl stretched and the armrests pulled off. The doors never closed with anything like solidity – one memorable Sunday morning on the way to church, my dad turned left and my mom, who was riding in the passenger seat, found herself hanging out the door, her posterior inches off the pavement, supporting herself by her legs and what little purchase her left hand could get on the vinyl seat and what small amount of her right elbow she could fit on the remnants of the armrest (no one wore seat belts in those days). Fortunately, dad managed to stop before she lost her grip. Mom’s easily flustered under the best of circumstances, so she was a real peach for a long time afterward.
A few years after we bought the damn thing, I looked it up in Consumer Reports’ used car guide. You know how they have the little circles under each criteria for each vehicle, with a solid grey circle being good, a half grey circle being fairly good, an white circle being OK, a half black circle being fairly bad, and a solid black circle being really bad? 1975 Dodge Dart = solid black circles across the board.
Nevertheless, I drove it for the first couple of years after I started driving, our only other vehicle being a 1974 Datsun B210 with a manual transmission that I hadn’t yet learned to drive, and which typically was with my dad who at the time was working in another town several hours away during the week. Before my senior year of high school, however, when we picked up stakes and moved, reuniting the family for the whole week, I learned to drive a manual and abjured the Dart for good. My mom finally convinced Dad to get rid of it soon after for a 1980 Buick Century that seemed almost as problem-prone as the Dart to me, but that she liked much better.
I have a Dodge Omni too. It’s a 90, red. I think they are all originally red. I had the brakes replaced twice in 4 years.
The door handle broke on driver’s side, you have to slide in throught the passengers. The gas tank has a leak (i tried to seal it, no avail) so you can only put 5 gallons in at a time. It still leaks at times, so I quite possible could explode. The paint has white spots(cancer). Hmmm, oh did i mention it’s a Omni? Yeah.
Luckily i just got a new car so now my BF inherits it. We traded in his 87 Dodge Caravan, which if you can believe it was actually in worse shape.
I haven’t had much trouble with vehicles, my T-Bird has been waiting for a new gas tank for a while but other than that the car has been pretty good. I hope to be out squealing the tires before my vacation is done.
My worst car was a 1980 Chev Malibu “Iraqi Taxi”. This was a model produced by GM to be exported to the middle east: V6, three speed manual tranny,AC, and heavy duty everything. It was a great car to drive and solid as anything. I think my problems lied with the previous owner who got repairs done at the wrong place and had poor driving habits. I once coasted into Calgary with the clutch all but gone. $600.00 later I was back on my way. The engine crapped out at 100,000 miles I think due to the high number of city driving the car had done before I got it. I had a friend with an identical car which had over 200,000 miles on it and nary a problem. I have met a few people with this same car and they refuse to let them go. When mine went it still had nary a speck of rust on it.
I understand that if you get a used vehicle you should expect to be fixing things, cars rust, and things just wear out. This makes car ownership easier once you understand this.
The one worst car? Man… every car I’ve ever driven has been an absolute POS except the current one.
The worst…
The Landyacht was probably the worst & most fun vehicle I’ve ever driven(1991-1996). It was a 1976 Chevy Suburban with the fold-down rear seat & a 350 ci V8 w/automatic transmission. Built like a tank, and fixing it was cheap and easy. Those are the good points.
It was originally maroon & white, but the previous owner had painted the roof white for some reason & had a mismatched door on the drivers side as well. The car had been driven in New York for a long time before I got it, so it had the worst salt induced rust holes all over it. It sounded funny, occasionally belched smoke, smelled kinda funky inside, go 10-12 mpg, had a balky gas gauge, and eventually sprung many leaks- weatherstripping, windshield, even holes in teh steel roof! Probably the most crappy aspect was the lack of functioning air conditioning(I lived in Houston & College Station, TX). If sweaty men are your thing, then you should have grabbed me back then!
Sold it for 400 bucks cash, and felt like I ripped the people off when I did.
3 different colors drivers door wired shut, had to clinb over that emergency brake between the front seats every time I got in or out, AM radio, no ac,sickly yello-tan color interior. FYI the hood opened up toward the windshield. When it was mercifully totalled, my hubby was nearly decapitated
'76 Plymouth Valarie station wagon (the wagon version of the Dodge Aspen). All of the following apply to said car, which I drove for about a year:
The master cylinder went bad, leaving me with no back brakes. Figured I could drive it anyway, until I had a chance to get it replaced. During this time, one of the front brake hoses ruptured, leaving me with no front brakes either. At the time, I was going about 40 mph down an extremely steep hill, at the bottom of which is a busy intersection followed by some woods and then Lake Superior. Much to my chagrin, I discovered at about this time that the cable for the emergency brake had been cut (it probably stuck sometime before the car became mine). I almost rolled it turning into the last possible driveway, and coasted to a stop inches short of some guy’s garage. He immediately came charging out of his house and demanded that I move the car. I said I couldn’t move it, it didn’t have any brakes. He asked if it ran. I said yes. He said I could move it then. I handed him the keys. He decided he could put up with it being there for an hour or two.
It was a tad bit rusted. The front seat fell through the floor. While I was driving it. I fixed this problem with a couple of 2-by-6’s, but it left some holes. Drove through a big puddle sometime after that with my sister in the back seat. She started screaming, and I turned around to see her absolutely dripping wet and real pissed off.
I pulled it into a full-service gas pump once when there was no space left in the self-serve. When the kid working there stuck the gas hose in, the fender fell off. He started apologizing like crazy, and I told him it was no big deal. I popped the gate open to throw the fender in back, then thought better of it and left it in their trash dumpster instead.
This thing refused to die, though. I live in northern Minnesota, where winter starting can be a problem. I stuck a Holly 4-barrel carburator from a ‘73 Duster on it, and it always started after that. I was jump-starting friends’ “nice” cars all the time. Also crashed head-on into a big conversion van, trashed the van and didn’t put so much as a scratch in my piecer. About week after that, I lost control on an icy street and piled it into a boulder at about 20 mph, and didn’t leave a mark on the car then either.
Sold the thing for $350 and felt guilty about it, then “upgraded” to a '71 LTD. But that’s another story.
Hasta.
The 88 Chevy Nova I have now, with screwed up engine bearings, that I’m praying will take me 200 miles to school tomorrow, from which I can catch a train home. :eek: