Your 'worst car' stories.........

I owned a 1985 Crown Victoria sedan that I bought off my Dad in 1992, just after returning from my tour in Germany. It was pale blue with the dark blue halo top and bleu cloth interior. I think it had maybe 66K on it then. I picked the car up in Nevada and drove it, my family and my cat to Oklahoma. Initially, the car ran spectacularly! I got over 24 mpg driving across the northern Nevada and Utah deserts, and 20 across the Rockies. I as very pleased with my "new" car, as Dad offered either this or his '84 Chevy S-10 extended cab swb pickup for the same price...in retrospect, the S10 would've been better, for what I needed at the time. Still, the Ford was a terrific highway car.

Three months later, the electrical demons struck with a vengeance! Two sensors, plus the distributor module conspired to make the car run like a complete POS! About 400 dollars later, it was running good, but not as good as first. We drove the car to Denver in mid-'93, and the troubles started again just outside Denver. Crap. I was losing patience with this damn car. My brother-in-law worked as a parts manager at a large Dodge dealer in Denver, so I took the car over there; looking to trade it in on a new Dodge pickup. Screw it, I wanted a truck! I found a 4x4 Dakota Club Cab V8 truck that filled the bill perfectly. Twenty grand. They offered a whopping $300 on a trade. $300??? Really? Oh, but hell no! We bought the Dakota and kept the Ford, thinking of how we were going to get the two home, with a two-year-old son in tow. My brother-in-law called a mechanic buddy of his, and we took it over and got it fixed. Turned out to be an intermittent electrical connection that was the likely culprit all along! Now this Ford ran like a friggin' champ! Cost me a whole C-note to fix it. His buddy called another guy to see if he was still looking for a Town Car, and would he be interested in a slick Crown Vic, instead. Guy came over, drove it, paid me cash money ($2,500), and we drove our new Dakota home.

Now, the Dakota ate up TWO overdrive units in the first 30K miles, but that is another story entirely!

 

Well, I've detailed this story before here on the forum, but it's lost in the archives somewhere. I'll relate it again for those who missed it or are new to the family......

The Mrs. and I had been married since January, 1974. We waited a long time to start a family, then had some difficulty actually starting one. Through the process of adoption, our first daughter arrived in May, 1988 as a newborn. We were there at the delivery. But I digress, this is not a kid story. Anyways..... several months into our new roles as parents, I decide that the 1986 Mitsubishi Galant 4-door sedan just isn't working for us as a mommy-mobile. (I REALLY just wanted to drive a STATION WAGON, but that was my excuse....). So I'm kind of checking out wagons for sale here and there, not really looking that hard. We weren't attempting to sell the Galant or anything like that.

So one day, I was driving down Tustin Ave. in Orange, Ca. where we lived then, and my sharp wagon eye spied a white Mercury Colony Park, '79-'87 vintage sitting on the local Chevy dealer used car lot. I run home, grab the wife and kidlette and race back to the dealer before some jackwagon steals it. Wagon looked beautiful. An '84, it had full power of course, leather interior, and a fairly low 60,000 miles on the odometer. My test drive was uneventful. In hindsight, I may have been a bit star-struck, as I don't think I made sure everything worked. We swung the deal, and drove the wagon home.

The next weekend, we were taking a weekend trip to LAS VEGAS, BABY, sans kidlette! Marcia's sister had agreed to take care of the little darlin' for us. At the time we made the arrangements this didn't seem like that big of an issue. We just had to drive 100 miles in the opposite direction, to Camarillo, drop the kid off, then head to Nevada.

Friday, departure came, and so did a huge storm to the L.A. area. We packed everything and hit the road around 5:00PM. This normally would have been a 2-hour drive. It took 5 hours. Never saw the L.A. freeways so jammed. We get to Camarillo, drop our daughter off and hit the road to Vegas.

It was a cold storm, so the car heater was required around the Victorville area. No go. All we were getting was cold air. Nothing much we could do about it. Pulled in to the hotel in Vegas around 3:00AM Saturday, which ended up being uneventful. Sunday morning, however, was a different thing. We got in the Colony Park and headed over to a coffee shop for breakfast. Pulling in to the parking spot, I notice some 'steam' coming out from around the hood gap. Didn't think anything about it at that second, "just some coolant sloshing out of the overflow.....". We start walking to the door of the restaurant and I hear, "Hey mister, you car's on fire!" The bus boy grabbed a fire extinguisher, I popped the hood, and we put out the fire, which really wasn't that big. Triple A gets called, wagon gets towed to the local Mercury dealer (service department closed, of course), and we procure a rental. Insurance company gets called, determines it was an electrical short that caused the fire, wagon gets totaled, and life goes on.....

One of these days, I WILL have another Colony Park.

Marshall

 

I'm a little bit young for this. I don't have any complaints about the car I got from my grandparents (1984 Chevy Caprice Sedan) or the 1990 Mercury Colony Park.

... Telling my Dad's stories though, he had a 1978-1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass (Diesel) which he said was the worst car he ever had because of all the time he had it in the shop. I've read about them though, and with proper maintenance and a water separator they run OK according to what I hear.

Going by my own experience as far as what he's had though, I didn't have bad car days in the 1990s - at least none that I remember now. After that though, we had some issues. I'll just name this one though:

2005-2006: The 1985 Jaguar XJ6 had its issues, maybe from a lack of maintenance as it wouldn't start (the flywheel had teeth missing from it according to my Dad) and we left it on most of the time once it did start. It had 109,xxx miles on it when it was junked in 2011.

 

I related the story of The Escort, but my father had a knack for buying mechanical nightmares. His first car was a Mk. 1 Austin Healy that was more watertight with the top down than up. He followed that with a '61 E-Type. Enough said there. He had a '71 Mercury Capri that started burning oil the day he bought it and traded that for a '73 Vega GT Kammback that not only burned more oil than the Capri, but rusted too. Fast forward to 1984, when a pickup truck pulled out in front of his 240Z. He needed a car quick so he bought a new Chevy Cavalier Type 10. I'll admit, it went almost 200,000 miles and the valve cover was never off the old Iron Duke, but everything else failed. The first thing that happened was that a plastic panel fell off the bottom of the dash which, I kid you not, had a sticker on it that said it passed its post build inspection! This was not encouraging. Then the windshield cracked and the drivers side door lock got water in it and exploded when it froze. The car was 2 months old. Neither was ever fixed. When spring rolled around the A/C didn't work the first time he tried it. The wiring got tangled in the belts and was ripped out of the compressor. The gearshift knob broke into 6 pieces, temp and oil pressure gauges quit working, as did the rear brakes, the passenger door pull pulled right out of the door, the ignition wiring under the instrument panel briefly caught on fire, the power steering only worked when it wanted to, the A/C was repaired twice more (every spring) then never worked again. The drivers seat broke, then the track ripped out of the floor, the cat clogged up the entire exhaust system, and the passenger front suspension collapsed, nearly ripping the fender off. Oh, it also went through 6 clutches, the last one exploding and jamming it in neutral. He got rid of it because he didn't want to have to pay to have another clutch put in, having done it himself once, and only once. By comparison, my '92 Tercel had its first clutch change at 171,000 miles. The best one was the switch that made it so it couldn't be started in gear failed. GM doesn't make spares apparently. At the 3rd or 4th dealer looking for one, he was parked next to a line of new Cavaliers. There was a couple looking at them with a salesman. He said "Before you buy that let me show you what I have to do to start mine," and proceeded to crawl under the instrument panel and beat on the switch while frantically clicking the starter solenoid. By the time he got it started the customers were gone.

 

The worst was my 84 Delta 88 Royale coupe. 42 work orders, plus innumerable trips back to the dealer, in 18 months and 48,000 kms, which is about 30,000 miles. The transmission was rebuilt twice, and the flywheel came loose another twice, so 4 times the transmission was subjected to a re and re. The back bumper was replaced after a month when the chrome peeled. The roof was painted 9 times, the door 5. The brakes were toast when I got shut of that thing. What a disappointment on a car that cost me a whole year's income, and that I had to wait to have built, as it was a custom ordered car. Warranty repairs cost G.M. more than the purchase price, including sale taxes.

 

The worst car I ever had was back in the 70's I had a Renault.
I didn't pay that much for it. It didn't start when it rained, had no power and turned out to
be a rust bucket.
I went shopping and came out to a flat tire. Car had no jack.
Took the plates off and left it there.

 

I had a Renault Daufene. Made the mistake of cleaning engine at the self service wand car wash and warped the head. Limped home and parked it until I got sick of looking at it. Called junk jard. Sometimes I wonder why I bought some of those small cars when gas was so cheap.:confused:

 

Thanks all for posting stories.
Reduces my Datsun horror somewhat.

 

I'm sure that if we've owned more than two cars at least one was a horror story.

 

I can't believe I forgot about my all-time crappy car story! It was a 1969 VW Beetle that I had for a very short time while I was stationed in Germany. I was at a NATO base in west-central Germany, along the Dutch border. This was truly an international base, and still is. There was an Italian lieutenant colonel in my squadron that had this car for sale. It ran decently and had passed the requisite annual inspection, and was only DM 800 (about USD$400, then). I needed a beater to get around in until my Dodge pickup arrived at the port, and the car was cheap enough, so I bought it. I lasted about 10 days or so. I was about a half-klick from the Dutch border when the car simply died. No start, no power, no nothing! Coasted to a stop and called a friend, who had a gorgeous '77 Chevy stepside, to give me a tow home. Wrapped the tow rope around the front axle, and started out. Bad move! Turns out that there was nearly NO solid sheetmetal around the axle mounts, and so as I was being pulled, the axle was coming loose from the frame pan! We only had to tow the car about three kilometers, and as we came to where we needed to go, the axle came loose from the car. It wasn't going anywhere!

A couple of days later, we rented a trailer and hauled the Bug to a buddy's house. He had room to screw around with the car. We decided best to simply part the car out completely. After we pulled every useable part, we separated the body from the pan, turned it upside down and stuck it in the back of my Dodge pickup, which I had pickup up from Rotterdam a couple of days prior. Took a few pics of the car in the back of the truck, before I hauled it across the Dutch border to scrap.

That VW was truly a piece of crap!