What's Your Worst Car Ever?

General Discussion
41

My worst car was my most expensive, and only new car purchased by me. 2006 Passat TDI. Utterly devoid of any fun, whatsoever. Dog slow, dead handling and heavier than the moon. removed fun of driving for 3 years. No amount of build quality, 600 mile range and bunker like safety can make up for Boring.

The car I learnt to drive in was terrible in every respect, Mum’s 1986 Escort with a 50hp “motor”. Under-steer, fade prone brakes, heavy non assisted steering, Would not run in the rain.

But it was the car I learnt in, so it can’t be the worst. That honor goes to the passat.

42

I bought a 1980 Skylark(one of the infamous X-cars), prior to closing the deal I drove it, the torque steer was so bad I thought it needed a wheel alignment. This should have served as a warning of what was to come. It ran fairly well until the warranty expired; then all sorts of problems began, like the bolts attaching the starter to the block breaking-this repeated itself three more times when I had the vehicle. Along with all the recalls and mechanical problems it spent more time in the shop then on the road. This was the last GM vehicle I ever owned. Obviously during development and testing the bean counters were trying to get every nickle out of these cars they could-they certainly succeeded.

43

@nwflvr things haven’t changed much since then, either.

look up the video about Bob Lutz and his book “Car guys vs bean counters”. The interview is about half an hour long, but a good watch/listen nonetheless

44

Heh heh. My first and worst was a 1960 Morris Minor I bought the summer after high school for $125. It wasn’t really the cars fault because it had been beat senseless by the previous owner. It was advertised for $175 but they dropped the price to $150 right away. Then when I went to pay for it, they dropped it to $125. Wouldn’t start without pushing it when I picked it up. First gear was gone, brakes leaked, half the carb was missing, and got about 20 miles to a tank of gas, but it looked cool after I painted it GM yellow. It had a short in the horn button so when you’d make a right hand turn with the signal on, the horn would honk and scare the pedestrians. I worked as a short order cook at the drive In and remember pushing it down the street in my whites trying to get it started after stopping for gas. Took it to the outdoor theater and we had to push it up the hills and down the hills afterward to get it started. Finally sold it to a guy I worked with for $250 and next time I saw him I thought he was going to kill me. Like I said I’m more of a form over function guy and it was a looker.

I almost went down to Tulsa for the Miss Belvedere unveiling. Decided not to after looking at how far it was from Minnesota and glad I didn’t. What a downer. They should have warned people a little that it might have been sitting in mud for 50 years.

45

Geoprince reported a car he had which used a quart of oil every 40 to 50 miles. Watch it, Geoprince, I reported a 1953 Chevrolet I had when I got drafted that used a quart every 30 miles, and someone hinted I was lying. It was true.

46

My worst car was a 1963 Corvair Spyder. It was an okay car until you approached a curve at anything over 45mph

 Not my experience.  I learned to drive on a Corvair.  I found that driving a FWD car was a problem.   It all depends on what your experience is.  

 Today I have been driving FWD for a long time, I doubt if I have the right reflexes for a RWD car today.  

 The key is to know YOUR car and how it handles.  Know your limitations and drive safely.
47

I had a Rambler, it regularly refused to ramble.

48

My folks had not one, but TWO AMC Pacers. You can imagine that driving these guppies was a real boost for my neurotic teenaged ego. They also had a nasty habit of stalling when it rained, so although they were automatic transmissions, at every red light you had to shift to neutral and brake with one foot and rev with the other to keep the engine from dying. If that failed, you had to jump out, pop the hood, remove the cover on the air filer, and stick a tire gauge in the carburetor, get back in, crank the engine, then put the whole thing back together again before the engine died again. This was particularly fun at busy intersections in downtown Chicago, and don’t forget that it only happened in the rain! Sigh.

49

1976 Chevy Chevette “Woody”… Unknown to me until it was too late, the previous owner ran leaded gas through it… Bad news since it called for unleaded… The poor car didn’t run well AND it was ugly!!!

50

My current car is the worst I have ever owned… It’s a 2007 Mazda CX-7…

The day after I took the delivery of this brand new, ZOOM ZOOM beast CX-7 home, I noticed some wrinkled on the fender, just above the tire… It was a defect on the body… The dealer had to make it sound as if he was doing me a favour by repairing it on my behalf… that was my clue #1

Clue #2 - after my first oil change, the “DEALER” forgot to torque the oil drain so I drove home with oil dripping down the exhaust, making it a nice smoky show - then a puddle of oil on the driveway.

After the two incidences, I didn’t need any more clues. I have had the following repairs in less than 60,000 miles…as of today…

1 - air-conditioning compressor seized and smoked - replaced
2 - wheel bearing gave out - replaced
3 - front brakes and Rotors replaced TWICE
4 - Variable Valve Timing Chain broke and replaced TWICE
5 - Variable Valve Timing ARM broke and replaced
6 - Turbo Charger totally blew out - just 500 miles shy of Warranty Expiration
7 - a slew of other issues too painful to remember…

The service desk at the dealer had the audacity to tell me that it was nice of Mazda to extend warranty for the VVT chain and arm and that my vehicle shouldn’t be considered to be a lemon.

I also had to show and educate the service manager that Turbo charger is indeed part of the power train and should be covered under the warranty… I helped him navigate to the Mazda website…

He then went on to suggest I should trade my car in for another Mazda…

“!@#%$^#%^&$^&^%&&$#$!!”, is what I said to him…

Zoom Zoom this, Mazda!

51

Mine was also a Vega, a '76. It had a fondness for snowbanks. Not a car to have living in Michigan’s UP. Because of one of its plunges into a snowbank, a tractor-trailer hit the same patch of ice and fishtailed, narrowly missing me and totaling the front-end of our new Chevy Blazer; my husband had come to my rescue and was parked on the side of the road where I went in the bank. My husband thought he was going to see me get killed, then the trailer hit his Blazer with him and our husky inside it.

52

In 1981, the public utility I worked for started getting serious about fuel efficiency, so I had to give up my tattered but beloved company car, a '76 Gran Torino wagon, with its 351 V8. In its place, I was issued a shiny new '81 Ford Fairmont station wagon. Now, I’ve always maintained that the BEST car is a FREE car, and I didn’t even have to pay for the gas… But still, the Fairmont was so crummy that sometimes I’d load up my personal car and work out of it instead. Things broke on that Fairmont that had never broken on any clunker I’d owned before… The tailgate came off (!) as did the right rear wheel, two of the doors decided to not open without much sleight-of-hand, HVAC controls became mostly decorative, wiper motor, power steering pump, even the master cylinder failed, causing me to have to drive to a dealership using only the foot-operated parking brake, left hand modulating the release handle (which worked just fine, oddly enough.)

Once cold, wet winter evening, I was leaving a power plant for the day. When I started the car, it backfired loudly and stalled. I was too tired to care why… so I cranked it again, and it eventually started. I drove to the plant gate and had to stop for a routine vehicle search. I unlocked the doors, popped the hood, and waited for the guard to do his thing. He lifted the hood, then slowly lowered it. He came around to my side and rapped his knuckles on the window… I rolled it down.
He said to me “Uh… do you know that your car’s on fire?”

I jumped out, ran around front, and lifted the hood. Yep. Just as reported. Bright flames engulfed the engine compartment. I got back in, got it started (!) again, and hood still up, pulled it over to the gravel staging area next to the guardhouse. Somebody showed up with a fire extinguisher and put out the flames, but not before the car was effectively totalled. As I waited in the guardhouse for one of my coworkers to pick me up, the guard said “sorry about your car, buddy.”

“Don’t be,” I told him. “If the car’s really a goner, this could turn out to be a good day after all.”

That backfire was the EGR valve exploding, and when it blew, it tore out the fuel line to the carburetor. Whole underhood area got sprayed with gas, which quickly found an ignition source. Our Fleet Operations did not fix the car. It sat, charred and sooty, behind the garage for several months before they decided to junk it. I ordered an '85 Econoline 350 Diesel van, which covered 261,000 miles over nine years, needing only an injector pump and a starter motor.

My Ford wagon went down in company folklore as the “Molotov Fairmont.”

53

1978 Dodge Magnum. It was big and silver with black interior and a good stereo. But the cruise control randomly turned on and off at freeway speeds, it only started 90% of the time and the sunroof leaked.

54

@whitevanman ; That car also had a habit if setting itself on fire. My brother-in-law had one and with the poor quality catalytic converter, which either plugged up or overheated (both in this case) the floor carpets went up in smoke when the cat overheated.

The car was out of warranty, and he salvaged it by getting a new cat and getting some rugs out of a wreck. He swore off Fords then and has not owned one since.Unfortunate, since Ford has built some good cars since.

55

Like Bing, I had batted the idea of attending the unveiling of Miss Belvedere at first but that got dampened down very quickly.

The time capsule was opened up for a sneak peek weeks in advance of the unveiling and the inspectors reported that it was “three or four feet deep in rusty water”. At that point it was obvious the car was beyond hope.
The water was drained and the capsule allowed to dry out before the unveiling.
The City saw an economic boost involved so the deep water was not even hinted at. :wink:

Considering the terrain and Tulsa being located on the banks of the Arkansas River along with basement flooding not being a rare thing, one would have though that someone back in the day would have raised their hand and made a few points about drainage, aeration of the capsule, and so on. The car may not have been perfect even with that but at least salvageable.

56

“…and he then bought a…Dodge Aspen!”

My wife’s first car was an Aspen. Her dad found the cheapest car he could for her to commute to college. It worked well for the 4 years she drove it. The red paint faded, but that was SOP in that era. The only complaint she had about it was the Armstrong power steering. It wasn’t a problem unless you were parking, though.

57

1985 Dodge Ram 50. Oh lord was this thing a hunk of junk. First of all, it was a Dodge with a Mitsubishi engine. This was before Mitsubishi figured out how to make engines. I think I had a prototype. Manual transmission. I replaced the clutch in this thing 3 times and I only owned it for 2 years. And I NEVER ride the clutch, they just liked to fall apart. 2 starters and 3 alternators were replaced. I found out the hard way that the gas gauge was slightly “off”. And by that I mean it was reading 1/4 tank when it was bone dry. I turned a corner near my house one day and felt the right rear hub hit the pavement while I watched the wheel and tire go bouncing down the street for two blocks. (It started to snow right when I was putting it back on).

I was finally able to get rid of it one particularly bad winter. I parked in the snow next to my roommate’s Ford F150 Pickup. After I turned off the key and set the parking brake, I found myself sliding sideways into his pickup. With a gentle crunch, the Dodge came to a rest. My roommate and I pushed it back and put concrete blocks down to hold it in place. It was so dangerous to drive it in the snow that I took the bus for the next several months. When the snow was gone, I opened the door to my little truck only to find about 6 inches of water on the floor and a very thick nasty layer of mold growing inside. I towed it to the Chevy dealership and traded it in for a car. I think they actually gave me a couple hundred bucks for it too. The fools.

58

Worst car I owned was an 80 model Pinto,acceptable mileage and ran good(except for the diverter valve blowing the muffler off) it was just cheap and poorly engineered(extra ground hugging weight and all)-Kevin

59

In the 50+ years I have been driving, I have never had a bad car.

How have I done that? Easy, I take care of my cars. I follow the manufacturer’s recommendations for maintenance.

Read and follow the recommendations from the manufacturer of the car (Owner's Manual).
60

1980 Renault Le Car. It was yellow. Took two years before we concluded (a) it was a lemon; and (b) it took a French Renault mechanic to fix it, because no one in in our area could repair it. Lingering issues were electric fan running down battery and ultimately head gasket leak that could not be repaired economically.caused its early demise…