My worst car ever didn’t start out that way, it just slipped the parking brake and ran backwards into a fire hydrant. There was a hellacious smash in the rear, and needless to say, the hatchback door didn’t work anymore, but it was so centered that the handling wasn’t affected. I drove it that way for about two years. There was no way I could afford to just junk it because it was incredibly butt ugly and made me look incredibly cheap (which of course I was).
My worst car ever was a brand new Ford Taurus, I bought it new (my first new car) during its first year of introduction. Big mistake. Total lemon. It had 2 recalls during its first year, I never heard of them until the recall was over so I had to pay for the repairs myself. Everything broke just one month out of warranty (like an $850 brake job in the 13th month of warranty, guess how long the brakes were covered?). The car was bankrupting me, by the 18th month I was paying more for repairs each month than for car payments and insurance. Finally the heater core blew, whenever I drove the car steaming radiator fluid would fog up my windows. Everywhere I went, I smelled like radiator fluid. It was going to cost a bundle to repair so I just told Ford I was not going to make any more payments, please come reposess your lemon.
I should have sued under the lemon law. I wish I had. This car destroyed my credit rating and ruined my finances. I’m still trying to recover from it, even now, a decade later. If there was one message I could send back through time to make the biggest improvement in how my life turned out, I would send a message back to myself, “DON’T buy the Taurus, buy the Camry!”
I had a POS 1989 Dodge Omni hatchback in 1985. I told my father I didn’t want it and I wanted a Honda instead.
Well, $1600 later and trading it in for my brother’s car, (I was in trouble for my grades, I was 16 and had to wait to get a new car) I talked him into my 1989 four door Honda Accord that kicked ass, woulda ran circles around that POS Omni. That Honda survived a lot of abuse from a teen and it ran like a charm.
I wish I still had that Honda though and I hope that Omni is in car hell…man it sucked.
No wonder I don’t like Dodge products.
< techchick now drives a 1993 Honda Accord that has been her baby for five years now with only a little over 80,000 miles >
A 1984 VW Vanagon. When I bought it, it had already had the engine replaced. I blew out an engine in it. I sold it to my brother in law, who put a new engine in it. That one blew also. He replaced it. Then he sold it back to me.(I’m not very bright)
I had it for 6 months when I blew out the oil seals on that engine. I paid $300 to get them fixed to a sheister mechanic in Goleta Ca. The engine still leaked oil like a siv, and actually blew oil out of the exhaust. I abandoned it in Santa Barbara and entered into a fued with Citibank, disputing the $300 charge. I lost.
But when it ran, it was a cool car. The only car I’ve owned big enough to have good sex in. There’s lots of head and leg room(a fond memory).
1990 Chevy Corsica. Don’t get me wrong, it ran great…No fault there. The problem was all of the !@#$ deer in my area. I hit 13 total with that car, and couldn’t afford to have it fixed, so I drove around with a multi-colored car, and a broken windshield for 2 years.
On a lighter note, I bought a '95 Nissan truck (Pretty!) 7 months ago…I am just now starting to feel like a man again.
Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!
~Can you be so warm? Can you know what I feel? -Better Than Ezra
My current car (well, van), a 1997 Chrysler Town & Country. It is 5 years old and has 87,000 miles on it. It’s had, count 'em, TWO new transmissions and ONE new engine so far, plus a few other “minor” (read: LESS than $1000) repairs. Recently the “C” has fallen off the “Chrysler” name on the back and in its place is a rusted spot in the shape of a “C.” I’d fix it, but I’m not paying Chrysler for the honor of advertising their heap of scrap metal.
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?
A buddy and I had to push-start it every morning to get to school.
The fan would never come on, so I had to wire a toggle switch through the dash.
I never could get it to go into third gear. Hsd to go straight from 2nd to 4th.
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.
Toward the end, the clutch burned up and the fender fell off from the rust.
In addition, I had to drive hunched up the car was so small (and I’m not particularly tall.)
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.
1992 Ford Taurus from hell. I still get pissed thinking about that piece of shit.
Not my car, but the car my folks let me drive as a youngun’
1984 Chevy Caprice wagon. With a diesel engine. One of Dad’s brighter ideas. It wasn’t so much that it was a bad car, but gods it was slow. 0-60 someday. It was supposed to get good mileage, but I spent so much time with my foot on the floorboards that I never got better than about 20 mpg.
Even worse, the Kid Car[sup]TM[/sup] before that was a '74 Chevy Nova with a 350 - going from that to the Tank was a serious shock.
::Worst car I ever had? My very first car…an '84 VW Rabbit. Got to the point that it wouldn’t go over 35. P.O.S. Got rid of that car when my dad got his Blazer, and he let me drive it everywhere. After that, I had a Pontiac Grand Prix SE. Now I have a Dodge Stratus.
1996 Plymouth Neon
I bought it as a program car. It had its first major problem on the way home from the dealer! :eek:
During the three years I owned that car, it was in the shop at least once a month. It went through brake pads and brake rotors the way other cars go through oil. Toward the end of my ownership of it it developed some weird electrical problem where the head lights would stay on even when it was shut off! I had to disconnect the battery each time I turned it off. Fuses blew almost at random. A whole list of other problems I’m not really remembering…
The final straw was when it blew up on the highway as Mrs. Rastahomie was on her way to work. I called my bank and told them to come get it.
Oh, yeah?
Well, in my adolescence, my parents handed down the Plymouth Volare.
Amazing vehicle. Enormous, unattractive, and blue. It had so little power that it wasn’t able to run the heat and the radio simultaneously. It would always stall at turns and stop signs, and occasionally stall randomly.
And then the horn started honking all by itself with no one in the car.
I hated it so deeply, that I actually RODE THE SCHOOL BUS to high school rather than drive it.
You guys aren’t even close. Unless you mention a 70’s era British car, you have no idea.
Try a 1978 TR-7, you would love all those heaps.
I swear, I could drive past a puddle and that car would quit running due to a wet ignition. (Well, that is a slight exageration, but only slight)
The switch that runs the headlights is so light duty, that they would melt from the heat of passing the current needed to run the headlights.
Actually, the mechanical and especially electrical problems with that car were endless.
The car that I’ve wanted to just be rid of the most is the one I have now: a '93 ford escort wagon. It has this horrible problem that no one seems to be able to fix - sometimes when I take my foot off the accelerator the car doesn’t decelerate. It keeps right on going like it’s on cruise control. Sometimes when it’s doing this I’ll shift (it’s an automatic) to neutral and the engine will rev up to maybe 4000 rpm, then drop back down to normal idle. Of course it doesn’t happen in park (it only happens when the car’s in gear), and when the mechanics hook it up to their diagnostic computer everything looks fine. I’m reluctant to saddle someone else with this psycho beast and I can’t afford to buy something new anyway, so there it is.
I’ll go ahead and ask the dumb question. Has anyone checked the spring on the accelerator pedal?
’73 Ford Courier
Saturdays were “clean the carbon off the sparkplugs and blow out the carb” days! Every single saturday…
Oh, and the “stereo”–not really an applicable term, since it only had one speaker–consisted of a tape player connected to a single RadioShack 8-ohm speaker glued into a hole bored into the dashboard. (Maybe the dashborad; can’t quite remember; just woke up.)
Oh, and it was puke green, with a rusted-out bed.
The car I drive now–88 Lincoln Town Car. The driver’s side door won’t open, inside or out. It sags on its hinges, but I can’t fix it because it won’t open. The radio is stuck on one AM station, talk radio. All kinds of little things are falling or breaking off. But the car was free–bought it in desperation when my other car blew the engine, got hit and collected more than the cost of the car! Oh well, you get what you pay for.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by galen ubal *
**
There are no dumb questions regarding this car and any suggestions are welcome. That was one of the first things I did since I thought maybe there was some sort of interference with the action of the pedal. Would there be a difference in pedal action if the car was in gear (when the problem happens) vs. when it’s park or neutral (seems to work fine)? Like maybe the spring is too weak or something?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by mack *
**
I wouldn’t think so, but I’m not a pro mechanic, just an occasional shade tree. But I don’t see how the gear would affect it. The only other thing I can think of is perhaps when the engine heats up, the heat causes something to expand and it binds the throttle. Shifting to neutral may jar it loose.
Any real mechanics out there want to comment?
A 1972 Ford Torino. Mine was deep metallic green.
It had the 351 Cleveland engine, and it was fast as hell…for a while. Just long enough, in fact, to collect several speeding tickets and go through a set of tires. Then it seemed like everything went at once: valves, push rods, water pump…you name it.
Damn thing turned into a second occupation.