Your worst car ever

In My Humble Opinion
21

My worst car was my first. It was a late 60s Chrysler (?) Simca. It was basically a square, boxy, blue thing on these really tiny wheels. Cracked windshield. No radio, no anything. One of the least hip cars on our planet.

It was a high school grad present from my parents. I was expecting, oh maybe a nice watch, when they told me that they had given me a car. I thought, “Cool”, until I went outside and looked at it.

“We got it at an auto wrecker’s yard. It was only $50 ($30 in U.S. funds),” my mom said.

Well, I thought to myself, they meant well, and it is a nice gesture, but.

Also, the car had an odd smell, and these really uncomfortable plastic covered seats. It looked like nothing else on the road and had been driven to death and back again.

I didn’t have my license yet, so I’d sit in the passenger seat. I’d notice that the car would start to vibrate and wobble a little when it hit 40 MPH. The front floorboards on my side were rusted out completely, so I could see the road whip past underneath me as we drove.

My dad tried to keep it going. He put some kind of spackle on the rust spots. Finally, he came back after giving it a test drive and said that it had to go back to the wreckers. He’d been driving it down a side street and the engine had literally fallen out of the car as he was driving.

Crappy car, but a funny anecdote…

(My mom had a beloved Honda Civic, whose main vice was that it leaked oil so badly that she kept a case of motor oil in her trunk, just in case.)

22

LMAO!

My worst was a 1980 Pontiac Grand Prix that I was stupid enough to buy for $200-in 1996. I was living with my Mom for the summer and just needed something to get to work. It actually broke down while I was driving it home after buying it!
In the course of that summer the following happened:
-Fuel pump broke.
-Had to drop $400 to replace muffler and pipe.
-Found out one tire was down to the thread, $50 to replace it.
-Found out at the same time the ball joints were bad.
-Driver’s side door broke. Had to enter from passenger’s side.
-Drained battery, had to get a new one.

It came with no stereo and most of the upholstery gone. It was dirty, nasty, and smelly.
This car had two saving graces: a HUGE V8 engine and a power sunroof that actually WORKED. It’s a good thing the sunroof worked too, since the car pumped exhaust fumes right into the passenger compartment. When you hit the gas it had some serious muscle though. I was driving home from my last day of work before going back to school when it just stopped running. I costed home and sold if as scrap for $25 a week later.

23

Any new bad car stories?

24

My brand new 2000 Suzuki Esteem wagon has been sitting in the shop for two weeks (second time in 6 months), The engine is fully apart for the second time. When I was driving back from New England, the car trembled like a toddler on a sugar high and Barney binge, and the ‘check engine light’ is permanently on. No idea what’s wrong, and the mechanic is stumped.

Ironically, my '86 Dodge Omni was dented in nearly every vertical surface (other drivers, shopping carts), but the engine never gave me a lick of trouble. The drive shaft finally fell off at 187,000 miles. I miss that car, even though it looked like heck. (No rust, just dents.)

25

My worst car ever was the first one I ever owned. A hand-me-down. It went from my father to my brother to me. 1980(?) Buick Skylark. It burned through clutches like nobodies business.

One day the drivers side door fell off for no apparent reason. I had to find a replacement at the junkyard. Metallic grey door on a deep red car. I used to park in the far end of the school parking lot to avoid the embarrassment. Luckily my parents felt my shame and replaced it a year later.

I still rue the day my brother and I talked my father into getting this hunk ‘o’ shit.

26

My current car, definitely. A 92 Ford Tempo. It was used by my mom for commuting every day for something like 6 years. It’s also been all over the country. It has just a smidge under 300,000 clicks on it, and everything that could go wrong, has. And continues to go wrong.
I was in the middle of the desert in Nevada when the fan belt broke. My front and back tires recently blew at the same time. My driver’s seat broke not too long ago so I had to get a new one (It wouldn’t stay forward). I don’t think there’s an original part on the car. And, to make matters worse, all of the windows have had to have been replaced because of people breaking them. Though, it still looks okay on the outside, it’s a real junker.

27

Was it the 1988 Escort, or the 1987?

The 1988 I bought from my uncle for $1000. It had no acceleration, no brake power, no power steering (!), no nothing. Just a three speed automatic backing a 1.9l 90hp engine. Wowzers. I hit a railroad crossing post on an icy day, and the whole front end bent down in a freakish V. Then my friend Missy hit a donkey in it, and basically the front end fell off. One time I was parked at Aldi’s, and someone stole my headlight. Yes. They stole my headlight. It kept blowing tires, and the alignment wouldn’t stay straight. It was an embarrassment. Finally, after blowing yet another tire, I parked it in the grass, invited my friend Jon over, and we beat the holy hell out of it with the steel bumper-mounts. It looked like it had been in a gang war.

Shortly after that, I bought a 1987 Escort GT 5spd. It had 120hp, 140lb/ft. Man, was it fast. :rolleyes: When I bought it (for $200) it had what they said was a blown engine. So it got a valve job, a bore, new rings, and a rebuilt bottom end. (All by myself, thank you much.) The car actually was fast, compared to the others in my school’s parking lot (poor hick school), so it was nice to have. It kept leaking from the radiator, though, and the temp gauge broke, so I never knew when it was getting too hot. 12000 miles after the rebuild, and right after I put new rubber on it, new struts all around, and fixed most of the electrical and mechanical problems, it blew a head gasket and bronzed the engine. I sold it for $375, after sinking probably over $1000 worth of work into it, not to mention HID lamps, front and back blackouts, new foglights, and a LeBra. And how did it thank me? With oxidizing paint.

Now I drive a 1990 Cavalier Z24 5speed, and lemme say. Build quality, power, control, looks, and handling wise, it’s lightyears ahead of either of those lemons.

–Tim

28

Oh, I forgot to mention the new clutch, new fuel pump (what was ACTUALLY wrong with it!), the stolen CD player, amp, and sub, the Rockford Fosgates at all four corners, the carpeted dash (!) that a previous owner ‘graced’ it with, the ‘leaky’ steering wheel (it left a black, greasy residue on your hands) that no amount of cleaning could get rid of, umm… what else? I replaced basically every single electrical and mechanical component in this car. Everything. If it could come off or out, I replaced it. How rude.

–Tim

PS Do you know how HARD it is to find a vaccuum diagram on a 13 year old car!?

29

My first car was the worst. It was a two-tone blue '80 Ford Fairmont. (4 years old when I got it.) It had a leak somewhere that we couldn’t find and fix. Had to keep putting water in it. So a couple of times it overheated on me, once bad enough to warp the head. It had to be replaned. Also lost the electronic brain once. Since I was working nights in the next town, I got rid of it, because being broke down in the dark, on the side of a highway does not appeal to me, terribly much.

30

My worst car (in a long line of bad cars) was the first one I bought. I had arrived in California about 8 months earlier, and had just been laid-off with a small severance package.

In my 20 yr old wisdom, I spent 600 dollars on a 1971 distressed Chevy Malibu. It ran ok, once it warmed up. Horrible interior, decayed weather stripping. The most noticable feature (and it was VERY noticble) was the paint. It was HAND painted, with a brush, not spray painted. Bright, bright orange, almost florescent. I called it ‘The Atomic Carrot’.

Dope makes you do funny things.

31

I feel like such a low-life. When I turned 16, my parents were at a church bazaar where they were raffling off a car for a dollar a ticket. So my dad bought a ticket, thinking, “Hey, we could use an extra car so my darling baby girl will have one all her own!” My mother told him NOT to enter the raffle, as the car being raffled was a 1980 Plymouth Volare, and she just knew that if he entered, he would win. And win he did.

So they brought home this monstrosity of a car-boat. It was blue with light blue simulated leather on the top and it was huge and horrible and you could turn the steering wheel halfway around without it actually having any effect on the direction the car went. If you tried to make too tight of a turn, it died. It was really bouncy and sort of felt like you were floating as you cruised along. It always reminded me of an FBI car.

Anyway, dear old dad gave me this car and I drove it for the summer. It wasn’t so awful that summer, even though the a/c didn’t work, because my best friend had a gray Chrysler (which we nicknamed Jesus {pronounced Hay-sus} Chrysler, by the way) that was exactly like the Volare (which we nicknamed Mary Volare to go with Jesus Chrysler). But when it came time for school to start in the fall, I moaned and pissed and told my dad that people would make fun of me if I drove that POS car to school (which was a real snobby one in Denver). Nevermind the fact that my friend had absolutely no problem driving Jesus Chrysler to school. But hers had an 8-track and mine only had AM radio.

So, I said, “::tsk!::: Daddy, I don’t like that car!” and made him trade cars with me for the rest of high school, which he did without complaint, even though he worked 50 miles away and the Volare didn’t have a/c or FM radio.

What a nice dad. I think I’ll go call him and say thanks.

32

silent_rob: A friend of mine had a Tempo. They also had a 60’s-era VW Bug they bought in Europe. Guess which one spent literally half the time in the shop? (No points for guessing.) The Tempo almost killed them on a couple of occasions; the most entertaining incident was when (IIRC) a tie rod broke, and a front wheel slammed over to one side, sending the car screaming off at a sharp angle across three lanes of oncoming traffic. Wound up sunk to the hubcaps in a muddy yard; another five feet and they would have crushed the startled homeowner, who was working in the flowerbed, against the side of his own house.

My own worst car was, like so many others, my first. For my 16th birthday, my cheapskate dad gave me a 1978 Chevy Chevette he had scrounged up from a fleet-car auction. Total POS; we basically had to replace every single thing on the car except the seats, the frame, and the body over the first couple of years. The weirdest thing was that every time we worked on it, we discovered that every metal surface, exposed or not, was rusted. We did a little research and discovered that the car had been – I kid you not – submerged. Lord only knows how they got it running again, but I guess that’s why my dad was able to steal it for a hundred bucks.

Eventually, it broke down for good and stranded me in Seattle (I was in the process of moving here for college). My dad had never bothered to transfer the title from his name when he bought it, and by that time I was fed up with his cheapskate asshole bullshit, so I gave up on the car. I wanted to just have it junked, but because it wasn’t in my name, the scrapyard guys wouldn’t take it from me. It was like pulling teeth to get the proper paperwork from my father so I could put the car in my name and get rid of it. After weeks of haggling (how hard could it be?), he sent me the wrong paperwork yet again, so I said “fuck it” and put it on the street to be ticketed and towed. He wants to keep messing with it, I said, he can deal with the citation and impound.

That was in 1989. He and I haven’t spoken since.

I don’t think I’ve ever told this to anyone…

33

Update on my 2000 Suzuki Esteem wagon (posted above under ‘Bad New Car Stories’).

The dealership called this morning, and they are completely stumped. They have taken the entire engine out and tried putting it back together. Evidently they are frustrated by this also (I can imagine seeing a few parts left over), and are in the process of putting in a whole new engine. “That should take care of it.” Riiiiiiggght. :rolleyes:

Did I mention this car had only 3000 miles on it?

34

…I got all y’all dilettantes beat, I owned a 1966 Renault Dolphin, a true gallic piece of merde’…a hands down lemon
all the pick up of a lethargic, narcoleptic three toed tree sloth…parts were a nightmare!..had to travel two states away to get a motermount and a clutch…go to those cartalk goons’ website and see if your piece of shit made their 10 worst cars of the millenium list(mine did :p) at:

35

late 60’s Austin America…

First car, which I was supposed to use to commute 50 miles a day to freshman year of college. Smaller than those 70’s Honda Civics. Decent gas mileage, but drank oil.

One hot summer day, drove to the military base Gas Station and started pumping gas. Pump went over $5.00, which got my attention, because the thing only had an 8 gallon tank. The fuel filler tube had disconnected and gas was sloshing around inside the passenger compartment. Being a dumb 16 year old, went to the sales clerk, who told me to drive 4 miles across Post to the Service Station. Turkey there decided the right thing to do was use a chisel and punch to make a drain hole in the car’s floor. Through providence, nothing exploded. Carpet, such as it was, had to come out. Didn’t keep that one long.