What is the biggest PITA you have had on a vehicle?

Mine too. But the axle coming out was the one that caused me to get rid of it…ASAP!

Interestingly, when Chevy issued the recall notice for this problem I took it to two different dealerships for the recall service. Chevy’s recall service was simply to check the end play. Clearly they were just trying to get off “on the cheap”. Clearly the C clip system needed a redesign.

putting long tube headers on my Mustang. It was no picnic. In hindsight I should’ve replaced the clutch while I was at it. It’s going to be a nightmare replacing it now.

My brother owned a 1966 (?) Datsun SPL-310 (known in Japan as the Fair Lady, or some such nonsense), and it was purchased as a new car. This badly-made copy of an MG was clearly not designed to be repaired, and the bumpers were totally rusted within ~ 14 months.

While the problems with this car were, literally, too numerous to list, the most aggravating one had to do with the air filter for the side-draft carburetors. The only way to remove the air filter was to remove the carburetors, due to zero clearance between the filter housing and the inner fender. Needless to say, after doing this once, we never again bothered to change the air filter. But, since it was essentially impossible to start the engine if the temperature was below ~ 40 degrees, it didn’t actually accumulate that much mileage.

We seriously considered pushing it off of a cliff and claiming that it had been stolen, but we didn’t want to chance running afoul of the law. Eventually, our neighbor’s father bought it, even though we warned him that the rusted 3 year old hulk would not be able to pass the state motor vehicle inspection. He winked, and told us that he “had ways around the inspection problem”–whatever that meant.

Good riddance to that crap Datsun! However, after reading about Le Car, I have to admit that the problems with the Datsun seem minor by comparison.

My first PITA was a 1970 Fiat 124, what a nightmare to adjust the valve clearance and change the timing belt. NEVER AGAIN!!!

Resently, had to replace the front seals on both camshafts and crankshaftof a 1995 Mazda 929, that were easy, but replacing the timing belt was a nightmare. My son will have to pay me a lot of money to do that again.

Mine was a 95 Ford Contour. Towards the end of it’s time with me, it started drinking anti-freeze. I had a mechanic fix a few things on it to try and get it to stop, but ultimately, it would keep on losing coolant and over heating. He had it in his garage and he said he let it idle for 3 hours and it was dry underneath the car. After that, a few days later it started losing coolant again, so I started shopping for a new car. Coolant didn’t leak onto the ground, it just disappeared. And this was a time when I was making just over $6/hr and didn’t want to keep dumping money into the darned thing, so I traded it off for my Honda I still have today.
Skip’s story made me laugh towards the end when he said the Chevy truck was getting worn out chauffeuring his Ford around.

What are you talking about, a Fiat being a nightmare, my 76 128 never broke done more then once a month :slight_smile:

Clearly the C clip system needed a redesign.

Unfortunetly that wasn’t the only thing that needed to be redesigned.

Late 2004 through December 2006. Ford changed diesel engines in mid 2003 from the tried and true 7.3 to the 6.0 liter. They spent well over $500,000,000 in warranty claims on those trucks alone, got into a major lawsuit with engine supplier Navistar over it even though the problem was in the upper end of the engine which is the part designed by Ford. As the ordeal drug on, Ford became less and less willing to pay for warranty repairs. Basically, by the time I was half way through my problem, they were instructing their dealers to bandaid these piles of junk together and hopefully get them through the warranty period so the burden of repair would fall to the owners and not Ford. Early on, Ford replaced a bunch of these trucks, particularly 03’s and 04’s trying to keep good will with it’s customers. By the time I started realizing what kind of problem I had, Ford had all but forgot about good will as they lost tons of money on these vehicles. A time or 2, I think they just cleaned that EGR instead of replacing it. The trucks that had the worst problems were the ones that idled a lot. Ambulances, work trucks, etc. I inspect property and generally, my truck idles when I get to a job. It’s my office, if I’m working in 20 degree weather, I want my office to be warm, if it’s 90, I want it cool, and I have computers etc in there running as well. I know at the dealer that worked on mine, they constantly had 2 of the county’s ambulances in there, the coronor’s Excursion with the same engine, and several of the coal company foreman’s trucks. The trucks driven on the highway at high speed for long distances didn’t have the same problems.

I had a friend that had an F450 with the same engine and a welding rig on it. Of course, his truck runs on the job the entire time (Hydraulic power for the crane comes from the tranny’s PTO). They kept his welding rig in the shop for 3 consecutive months, put 3 engines in it and never did fix it. 2 months into the 3 month stay, he sent his crane crew to the dealership with a small crane. They drug the truck out into the parking lot, showed up with a brand new Chevy 4500 cab and chassis and proceeded to remove the welding rig from the Ford and install it on their new Chevy chassis in the Ford Dealer’s parking lot. Of course they took their sweet time on the job making the dealer stay after hours to lock up his lot when they were done. Understand, he had a crew of 2 men assigned to that truck to service heavy machinery and he’d had to pay them for 2 months without them having their tools to work with not to mention how far they’d gotten behind fixing machines. I’ve not often seen my friend mad, but my case worker at Ford knew him well for some reason or other. The thing is, he was a Ford Fleet customer. His business has around 25 or 30 trucks on the road at all times.

If Dodge had built a 450 and 550 sized truck at the time, they would have completely cleaned Ford’s plow in the truck market.

Skip

LOL. Four letter words for lubricant. Very funny.

Did they wait until the shop was almost closed to do the re-rigging? I’d probably have done the same thing in his situation.

Some friends of mine bought Vegas to be patriotic and save on gas. Problems I recall:

  1. The radiator (about one square fot) was too small; the aluminum block was supposed to radiate a big part of the engine heat. Unfortunately, a dirty engine block does not radiate much.

  2. The aluminum block did not have liners, just some coating. It quickly wore off, and with the overheating problem, caused high oil consumption.

  3. The rust protection on the body was non-existant; road salt quickly chewed away through the fenders.

  4. The exhaust was very loud, bordering on illegal. My friends were often stopped by the troopers and had to explain the exhaust was “standard issue”.

  5. The seats, with little padding were designed to turn all owners into orthopedic patients.

  6. hardware was dimestore quality, and things fell off regularly.

No doubt some of you may have had at least one of the above experiences.

The Corvair was actually a better car after the axle redesign.

And then, GM introduced the Chevette. Later, the Chevy Citation (and its X-car cousins).

Quite a record with small cars for the General, wouldn’t you say?

They even briefly imported the Vauxhall cars from their British susidiary. These cars had no rust protection, questionable electrics, and even the jack in the trunk rusted away before the first flat.

The Vega was a “corporate car” forced on unwilling divisions to demonstrate GM could compete with the VW beetle. Even the plant where it was built suffered from the “Lordstown Syndrome” (from Lordstown, Ohio) a new HR term coined for workers who are well paid, work in a new plant and just don’t care! This attitude also adversely affected the Vega quality.

My brother bought the Olds Omega X car; a nice looking car, but frought with design problems. He sold it after 2 frustrating yeras trying to keep it running and the steering rack from seising up.

Actually, Doc, it went beyond “not caring”. Many of the employees at Lordstown engaged in actual sabotage of the vehicles that they were manufacturing.

Slashed upholstery was not uncommon. The worst was when they placed Coke bottles and the like inside door panels. One employee was quoted as saying, “That’ll really make the customer crazy when he drives this car”. Yup–so crazy that the owner likely decided to buy a Japanese car as a result.

Sometimes you just can’t save people from their own idiotic behavior, and sometimes they just deserve what results from that behavior.

Doc–I bought a Chevy Citation (X-Car), and the first problem was the paint. It actually took 3 re-paints before I was satisfied that no primer was still showing through the 1/2 coat of paint that had been applied at the factory.

And then, there was the design of the emergency brake, the design of the clutch, the transmission, the rear wheel bearings, the aforementioned steering rack…

Luckily I bought the extended warranty on that car, and I am confident that GM actually lost money on my car as a result of the repairs that I forced them to make under that warranty.

Yup, I remember the recalls on the cooling system, the engine, the axle, and one other…the idle stop solenoid. The bracket would break (stress fracture) and the solenoid would fall into the accelerator linkage pinning it wide open.

By the time the cooling system and the solenoid bracket recalls came out I had already experienced the failures and done my own modifications.

Oh, and the heater hose going to the heater core chafed through. I custom designed and made a nice curvy aluminum tube to rerout that fluid path. Okay, I confess, the guys in Airframes made it for me. I just designed it.

Yeah, the Corvair was a much better car. My dad had a '61 that I learned to drive on and later a '65 that I drove often. Doggoned lawyers.

I will go along with that, but when they did they really did.

I understand they hauled in a light plant to finish up.

Skip

While everyone is bashing on Detroit I guess my PITAs are a bit different since I’m a predominantly “foreign car” guy. Here’s two; one from Japan and one from Europe.

The old SAAB 99s had an aluminum water pump that mounted in a cavity in the engine block UNDERNEATH the intake manifold. After a few years cast iron/ aluminum corrosion would practically weld them together. Intake manifold off and the pump cover often require an air chisel to shake loose, IF you were lucky. The other option was removing it in chunks. This was only half the job. At that point a draw hammer was threaded into the pump impeller and the impeller was banged out.
The problem was that the draw hammer often broke the adapter fitting before the impeller came loose and this was a real peach; it was only threaded 8MM x 1.25 anyway and it was a LEFT handed thread. Nice.

The wet sleeve Subaru engines of the early/mid 70s. The cylinders were removeable from the engine block and each cylinder sat on a copper gasket ring that then perched on a ledge in the engine block. When setting an engine up properly the cylinders had to protrude .005 above the block (the copper rings were available in different thicknesses.).

The heads were torqued again at a 1000 miles and were retorqued each 15k miles. Copper is a soft metal of course and over time the copper rings would crush down until the liners were even with the block surface. At this point the head gaskets would let go again. On these cars, any overheating at all would pop a head gasket instantly, proper cylinder protrusion or no.

A draw hammer with a friction tool was used to remove the cylinders from the block and often this was a battle due to the cylinders being rotted into the block.

To irritate the DIY consumer even more, Subaru had a number of bolts holding the engine block halves together. One of those bolts was hidden, and I mean very hidden, up inside the valve lifter cavity. You would not believe how many Subaru engine blocks were destroyed because someone was not aware of that one lousy bolt; or the sheepish look on their faces when told about that bolt after the fact.