Tell us about your worst car

My college car.  '81 Pontiac Grand Prix with the big bad carbureted 3.8.  It could outrun tractor trailers if they were loaded.  It would keep up with them if they were empty.  But uncoupled they'd clean my clock.  
 

But what it had going for it was its reliability.  And I hated it.  I tried to kill it one summer by driving home from school with my foot to the floor (you could only get a ticket going downhill) and it being very low on coolant.  Pegged the temp gauge for about 60 miles.  Didn't kill it.  I drove it 2 quarts low- to the point that when you revved the engine you could see the oil pressure gauge dip.  And I thought I had it because it started to knock.  Turned out it was the lifters collapsing.  Added oil and it was fine again.  Then we had a blizzard and my dad had great fun building up a bunch of speed and busting snow drifts.  He did this for over an hour not realizing that the snow was packing the radiator.  That killed it.  What a relief.  I'd finally get a proper V8 this time.  But then dad announced that Jerry (our local shade tree wrench who owed us money) had agreed to rebuild it in exchange for the debt.  And he did.  Painted the rebuilt engine GM Euclid green (a very apt color since it wasn't a lot faster than a mining truck).  And it ran just as good (bad) as ever for another 50k miles.

In reply to A 401 CJ :

I had an '81 Olds Cutless Supreme with that engine as my first car after college.   I made a solemn vow to never own an underpowered car again after that one, passing on two lane roads was an adventure to say the least.  It was a decent cruiser on the highway and it had that AC vent right under the steering column... 

Gutless Supreme

NavyNGLO said:

1978 Fiat 128 Sport Coup. Purchased new when returning from an overseas tour. Very overrated.

But cute!

In reply to ProDarwin :

Yup, that’s what I called it. 

1971 Plymouth Valiant.  

Only good thing - Body was solid - a semi truck could hit it and survive. 

Rest a POS - overheats, crappy radiator hoses, poor handling, no air conditioning, suck butt AM radio, terrible acceleration, all over the road, super wussy tires, think of the worst salesman's car ever.........I could go on for 90 minutes.  
 

89 Jeep Cherokee.  Ex wife wanted one badly, so I bought her one.  Never went anywhere in that buckey of E36 M3 without a full complement of tools.  A couple of family trips later, I bought a rusty old 760 turbo that was more reliable, and had enough room in the back seat for 6 and 10 year old daughters.

It just occurred to me that the pic in the article should not be an X car, but based on responses, rather a Subaru of some sort, perhaps a WRX.

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

My father had a Valiant Scamp. We beat the death out of that car and it always kept going. We frequently pounded down desert trails with that thing.

It did indeed handle like crap, had terrible brakes and was rather slow............but it's hard not to respect how much abuse that car would take.

In reply to Tom1200 :

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067023/

And it looks like someone stuck background music from The Terminator over part of it!

1970 Triumph GT6+

It was my dad's daily driver for years and he 'saved' it for me as my first car (thanks) so that I could have a car that was from the same year I was.

I was 15 in 1985 when we started working on it. It had been driven year-round in Minnesota for years before that so it had tons of fiberglass and Bondo covering up the non-existent rocker and quarter panels. My dad, being the 1970s guy he was, had it painted some kind of metallic turd brown. We did what we could to get it back on the road and had a local shop that supposedly specialized in British and exotic cars 'rebuild' the engine. I should have taken it as an omen that it didn't even make it's first drive home from the shop without overheating.

Being in high school, I didn't have the money or knowledge to really do the car justice. The charging system worked intermittently and the lights would randomly get brighter and dimmer as it phased in and out. I got to be a pro at putting it on the battery charger each night and parking it in anticipation of push starting. It constantly overheated even though we had done everything to the cooling system. I don't know what the bearing clearances were on that engine but they must have been insane. I ended up having to run straight 50 weight racing oil in it to keep any kind of oil pressure. The brakes constantly leaked fluid no matter what I did. It ended up with a pinhole leak in the gas tank so the inside of the car constanly smelled like gas.

My girlfriend at the time lived several hours away and when I would drive the car to her house, I could go for around 30 miles before all of the coolant boiled out of the radiator. I would then stop and fill it up with water from a roadside lake or stream and go another 30 miles or so. One time It crapped out and there was no lake nearby, so I filled it up with iced tea. Of course, every kid at my school who saw it told me to put a V8 in it.

The last straw was when I was at my girlfriend's house and lost drive because somehow the differential had completely stripped out. My dad sourced a used one and shipped it to me and I put it in on my back in a gravel driveway. I got 5 miles down the road and the same thing happened. I think I just left it there and took the bus back home. At that point my dad gave me a clapped out 70's Dodge Tradesman disco van to drive to school. It had the shag carpeting, was also brown (!!!) with a straight 6 and 3 speed manual that was so worn out that it's top speed was 55. One day when it was 25 below zero, the battery was frozen and exploded as I started it.

I have never and will never own another brown vehicle.

Strangely enough, the GT6 didn't put me off Triumphs. After college, I restored a TR4 ( in BRG) to a very high level and ended up working at a restoration shop that specialized in British cars. During that time I figured I'd do the GT6 right so I restored a '72 MkIII ( French Blue) to pristine, show winning status. Honestly, I was still scared of it, though...they were such fragile cars. I didn't feel that bad when I sold the second one. The TR4, on the other hand, was an absolute tank in comparison...what a great car.

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

I know that film well and absolutely love it........Dumas should have got the car fixed.

In reply to Tom1200 :

Sorry

It was an awful movie that's awesome.  Even my wife likes it which is rare for her being it's a car movie.

I've owned plenty of disasters, but if you divide things that broke by time owned, the worst was a 1995 Honda Civic. At one point, I had to thumb a ride with one of the GRM staff to get a ride to the parts store so I could swap the starter to get out of the Mitty before they closed Road Atlanta. Other failures in the year or so I owned it included:

A distributor that broke and left me stranded

The ECU catching fire

An air conditioner that only worked when it wanted

A distributor signal code that wouldn't go away even after replacing both the distributor and ECU

Coolant hoses bursting

Leaking radiator 

A crank keyway that failed and caused the crank to bore out the damper a quarter inch oversized 

And the craziest one... One time I was too sick of working on it myself, I dropped it off at a mechanic to have a noise in a front brake repaired. They called me a few hours later to tell me the brakes on one side were an inch larger than on the other.

This was in one year of owning it, and there's some other problems I can't remember off hand.

In reply to Datsun310Guy :

My dad had a company car that was a similar vintage Valiant. He had nothing good to say about it other than it took him to his hunting lease that you only ever saw 4wd pickups and Broncos/Blazers go to. He hated that thing, but luckily it was replaced by an Impala shortly after he got promoted. 

Worst? Is this relative to expectations or absolute worst? 

'77 MGB. It was an elderly, rusty British car that I paid under $1K for, so my expectations were low. At the time of purchase, it had a seized bushing for the lower pivot point for the kingpin which was ovalling out the A-arm, a suspected flat cam lobe, a leaking accelerator pump on the downdraft Weber conversion. 

Highlights:

On the drive home I learned that someone had bypassed the overdrive reverse lockout switch and shredded the OD by backing up with it still engaged. 

Dashboard fire from shorted gauge backlight. 

Brake failure due to rusted rear brake line failing as I was late braking for an exit ramp. 

Attempted to DIY rust repair sills and floorboard. Wound up replacing complete bodyshell with a better used one. (I have no idea why I went to so much effort for a rubber bumper MGB other than this mostly happened in the pre-internet, pre affordable Miata era. Also, stubbornness.) 

Rebuilt the engine. lead bung for an oil passage in the cylinder head blew out and spewed oil everywhere. 

Worst relative to expectations was a '99 Accord 5 speed, the most expensive used car I purchased to date and the first car I bought from a dealer. It burned oil...1 qt/650 miles. The Honda dealer was a complete dick about it, I wound up living with it. My quote to the dealer "Before I bought this car I was driving a '91 Accord I bought from some guy in an alley for $200. It's beyond disappointing that this car uses more oil than that one."  Other than that, it was a really reliable car, pulled down great gas mileage and made it to 150K, when it lost all compression in one cylinder. Not sure if it was a burned valve or what. The '91 Accord was also much more fun to drive than the '99. 

All of my Subarus have been solid. I don't know what you folks are doing wrong :-) 

ProDarwin said:

Gutless Supreme

My 81 had the 260 V8 - two barrel malaise era special. Could barely break traction on wet leaves.