What car that you owned have you most hated?

[NaMeaHou]

I currently hate my Chevy Van. No matter what needs to be replaced, there is less than two inches of free space to work in. Tools never do the job because they don't fit. What usually happens is that I end up throwing the tools in the dirt and do my best Hulk imitation while either tearing something up or fixing it.

Today, I actually fixed it. Miracles DO happen. It took a lot of anger, cussing and eventually praying, but it is fixed.

[mdvet]

1. my wifes prius

hated it beyond belief, pokey, crap and forever going tits up.

[maggrwaggr]

2. 1980 Chevy Chevette, 1994 Ford Aspire

thing was a total piece of crap. on wet roads, when you'd hit the brakes, it would slide sideways. Brakes would lock up. Just a dreadful car.

The Aspire was like a go-cart. Over 40 mph it would tremble and feel like it was going to fly into the air. Always felt dangerous. It's like they built the car as cheaply as they possibly could. Just awful.

[bobthedrummer]

3. 1969 Chev. Impala SS convertible 350

it died on me.

[Jim Sagle]

4. 1974 AMC Hornet. It needed 10 repairs in 6 months.

It was so bad that I was not only working for, but living for, my car. The repair costs made it hard to afford a replacement. Somehow (I don't remember how) I broke free and ditched it. It was not drivable by then.

[phaseolus]

11. I loved my Hornet...

It needed the things done that normally needed doing when you got past 100k miles -- new alternator, starter, clutch -- but it always was a reliable car for me.

I think my worst was a '80 Dodge Omni. The carburetor was mounted on a hunk of rubber that rotted away, the thing ran like shit for more than a year. So I got that fixed & the transmission died.

[DemoTex]

5. #1 was a 1974 Chevy Vega (POS)

Absolute piece-of-shit. #2 was a 1965 Simca hatchback. Actually, it's hard to differentiate between two dog turds.


POS Simca

[TheReligiousLeft]

6. '97 Ford Taurus

It was a really nice car, but my dad sold my T-bird without telling me and gave me a Taurus! Grrrr...

[Papa]

7. Yellow Datsun 210

Piece of crap. It was a hand me down. Had a transmission problem where it would skip 2nd gear most of the time. If you were in 3rd going around 30mph and needed to step on the gas, it would jump down into 1st. Nobody could ever fix it. Every thing that i got repaired on that car needed fixing again within 3 months. Without fail. So I stopped fixing things. By the time I got rid of it I had no breaks, no horn, no radio, no muffler, no ignition key thingy,...almost everything was wrong with it.

[flamingyouth]

8. Chrysler Concorde

Needed new transmission at 20k miles! Among other things....

[Droopy]

9. A 1981 VW Rabbit

It had a diesel engine in it and the fuel would always gel up when it got real cold. I tried anti-gel formulas but nothing would seem to work. Also, the thing had very little power. I had no pick-up when I was trying to get on the highway.

[childslibrarian]

10. a used Monte Carlo

Ate gas and handled terrible in the snow. Got caught on a hill in front of a city bus once...

[electricmonk]

12. Hated all of them except my current Nissan

Had a Chevette once, no need to go over again why it sucked.
Plymouth Horizon can't remember what year it was early 80's though, if it rained the driver side door wouldn't open and then once I crawled across the passenger side it would take about 20 minutes to get going.

76 Dodge Dart exactly like Al Bundy's. The engine in it kicked ass but the rest of it was falling apart. Bought it for $200 drove it for a year and sold it for $200.

1990 Pontiac LeMans was probably my worst one out of those though. Built in Korea by Daewoo and I'm convinced that they just put it together with whatever they had laying around the factory. Parts of it were metric other parts were standard. I lost the radiator cap once and went to get another from the dealer and even they couldn't find one that fit. They finally tried a BMW one they had and it worked. For some reason or another the windshield wipers were wired into the same harness as the stereo and no commercially available harness was compatable with it so I was stuck with a crappy stock stereo. I could go on but that's enough.

[midnight armadillo]

13. 85 Nissan Sentra

69 hp, station wagon, 3 speed automatic. A total dog. Some of you know the big hill on route 2 going east out of Cambridge, MA - I used to have to floor it to get 75 mph at the bottom and the old beast would top out at 50 mpg at the top. My old roommate dubbed it the "little car that could." Its fate was sealed when it attempted to throw its timing belt on that same rt 2, stranding me at the Aku Aku for 3 hours waiting for a tow. To this day I have a deep irrational prejudice against Nissans. Good riddance!

I replaced that with a 90 camry - dull, reliable, but at least it was a 5 speed. Next up I'm buying an early 90's Saab 900 as soon as I get a chance. woo!

[lpbk2713]

14. 1976 Ford Pinto Station Wagon

It's reputation is well deserved. Used about as much motor oil as it did gasoline.

[FireHeart]

15. 1986 Hyundai GL

The most evil car in the universe. In the 10 years I owned it, I spent more money on repairs (including original purchase price) than I have on BOTH of my Saturns.

Bleh...I still have nightmares about that demonthing.

[Gore1FL]

16. I say Saturn

Piece of crap -- worse yet, they buy into their own hype and try to avoid fixing it under warranty.

I'll never buy another.

[Throckmorton]

17. 1979 Ford Fairmont, hands down.

Without a doubt, the worst car I ever owned. You never see them on the road anymore, becasue people like me would ram them.

[baldguy]

18. 1978 Plymouth Horizon hatchback.

cheap POS rust bucket.

[Philostopher]

21. I had one of these, too.

It should have been painted yellow -- it was the lemon of the century.

I could write a novel about its faults, but I won't. Actually, the only thing mine didn't do was rust, what are the odds of that?

I will mention the one thing -- among many -- that was the most common, because it caused the most frequent, annoying and expensive problems: drove the car from fall of 1981 to the spring of 1984 and I put six alternators on the car. The alternator mount was poorly engineered, and the alternator housing was inadequate to support its weight on the engine, so after a while it would work the mounting pin out and the alternator belt would fall off. While I was driving somewhere remote, usually, so that the car would run off the top charge of the battery until I shut it off, and then it wouldn't start again.

The door and window mechanisms went bad. The exhaust kept falling off. one of the headlight mounts experienced metal fatigue within six months and the power clip would wriggle loose while I was driving (causing many a pull-over by police to tell me I had a headlight out, which I'd get out and fix right before their eyes), the windshield wipers used to fly off unpredictably, usually when it was snowing. It was a front-wheel drive, and the power steering drive belt sometimes fell off while I was driving, which I wouldn't find out until I slowed down and needed to make a turn.

My sister had a 1980 Omni that was a fairly serviceable car, but that '78 was enough to put me off Chrysler products forever.

[mrbill]

19. ford pinto

oh happy day when the wrecker towed that piece of crap off.

[trof]

20. VW DASHER

Oh lordy, what a Zitrone (lemon).
It had a foolproof (yeah, right:eyes:) method of making you buckle up.
The driver's and front passenger's seats had pressure sensor switches electrically interconnected with the seat belt buckles. If it sensed weight on the seat and the tab wasn't in the clasp, THE DAMN CAR WOULD NOT START!

Of course this Rube Goldberg invention didn't work. You'd be sitting there with your belt fastened and turn the key and...nothing. So you'd then jump your butt up and down in the seat until the contact switch finally made contact while the key was turned to start and the engine started...sometimes. I'm sure it was hilarious to watch.

It also had McPherson struts for front end suspension that were very expensive and very difficult to install. I went through 2 sets in a year and a half. I think they had to pull the engine to get them in, but that may be an exaggeration. There was a special machine to compress them for installation. One got away from the machine and went through the shop roof, landing in a parking lot half a block away.

[populistmom]

22. 1982 Oldsmobile Omega

God, did that car suck. It was my first car and it was awful.
Follwed by a close second of a 1979 Mercury Zephyr, my mom's car that I used to drive in HS until she get her Honda.

Sarah

[bif]

23. Datsun

Could it have been a 210? Or 510. I absolutely hated that car. Never ran well and everything on it fell off. And the parts were expensive as hell. I'll never buy a Japanese car again.

[ArkDem]

24. 1968 Corvette Stingray

Needed a tuneup every 50 miles. Something was always breaking on it.

[BigMcLargehuge]

25. 89 Golf

bought it with 12 miles on it. Spent untold thousands post 12,000 mile warrantly replacing:

upper cylinder head (twice)
pistons and rings (three times)
gaskets (three times)
oil pan (twice)

These 4 issues were caused by a bad engine ground that filled my cylinder head with carbon, choked the pistons and cylinders, and caked up in the oil pan like concrete. It took months of expensive diagnosis to locate the problem, and even then the fix wouldn't hold more than a week or two.

The best time was a backfire through the fuel injection system that nearly blew the upper cylinder head through the hood.

CV joints (four times left five times right)

The seat lever broke after three months
the two doorhandles broke five times each in less than a year
it ate brake shoes like graham crackers

Overall, for a 13k car I spent almost 7 just keeping it running.


I'll never, ever, ever buy a VW again as long as I live. I ended up broke after the repairs and had to turn the car in for voluntary repososession.

[Jokerman]

26. '74 Maveric Bicentennial Edition

Red, white & blue paint job. My dad put 130K miles on it without washing it once. By the time I got the car it was mostly rust.

Rolled it end over end through a cornfield one week before graduation.

[Aristus]

27. Both of my first two cars.

1976 Datsun B210 - Ugly f*cking thing. Had a good transmission and that was it.

1985 Chevy station wagon - Well, okay, I was a bachelor. What the heck did I need a station wagon for? I got it because it was cheap, and got me where I wanted to go. When it died, I got my coolest car ever: My Datsun 280ZX. Silver and black, looked like a needle on wheels, accellerated like a sonofagun,and had an indestructible Nissan straight-six engine. Sometimes, life is good. :-)