What's the sketchiest vehicle you've driven?

I saw this question posed on Jalopnik, and I know that you guys likely have some terrific stories.

Mine was the "Cheap Jeep", a $500 1997 ZJ Grand Cherokee that I bought off a coworker (who had coincidentally purchased it for $500) and proceeded to drove for 2 years. It was all white when I acquired it but then quickly sprouted a bright red driver's front door when the latch imploded. Because the hinge pins were shot, a previous owner had slammed the E36 M3 out of it against the striker and mangled the sheetmetal, so it was just easier to swap doors. It had rust everywhere, it was really spongy around where the front lower control arms attached (someone had gone in and plated and welded the rear ones up at some point for the same issue) and had "ventilation" holes in the cargo area floorpans. I immediately had to replace the trans pan and rear diff cover, because they looked like curtain lace, at which point I learned that 42RE trans pans are apparently made of unobtanium. Spearking of the 42RE, it had a mind of its own, and a deficient one at that, with strange uncommanded neutral shifts. You'd be sitting at the end of the driveway waiting to pull out, traffic would clear, hit the gas and it would be like it was in neutral. Cycle the shifter from Drive to Park to Drive and it'd go and then sometimes it'd forget where it was headed on the way to 2nd and go to Neutral again.  One blown front shock and two blown rear shocks meant that it wallowed like a drunken walrus after hitting bumps and would set up a body-roll oscillation that would make you seasick. The only way to make that stop was to reduce speed or come to a complete stop and wait it out. The exhaust was held on by an atheist's prayer. I drove it for 2 years, only locally on short trips (I have a 3-mile commute), until I became sufficiently scared of it and parked it, and then my father reanimated it for another two years, by which point the rocker cladding was held on by duct tape, until the front control arm ripped out of the unibody and sent it to the grave. 

I have no photos of the wretched machine, sadly. 

My father bought a 1964 Chevy C10 from a coworker for $750. It had a 230 straight six, three-on-the-tree, and a body that was made of old license plates, pop rivets and Bondo. 

I was driving it home when I was about 17, hit a bump, and one of the rusty rear trailing arms broke in half and the rear axle was hanging by one side. I found myself with four wheel steering, no seatbelts and a fuel tank inside the cab. I've never spun a steering wheel so fast and so far in my life. Somehow, I missed the giant oak tree, had it towed home and swapped in some fabricated trailing arms to get the still sketchy remains back on the road.

The Locost that I bought.  There are some really nice Seven clones out there, but this wasn't one of them.

Carburetor fuel hose with a 50 psi rating being used a 65 psi FI system, pushed onto the end of the donor Miata fuel system components (intended to be quick disconnect) and secured with worm gear hose clamps.  Control arms that were 3/4" shorter on one side than the other, resulting in a mismatched wheelbase.  5-point harnesses with low-backed seats, shoulder belts went down at about a 45 degree angle.  The donor Miata fuel pump hanger had had the bolt-down ring cut off and then welded back on (no idea why), it was crooked and leaking.

It was all fixable, but it was definitely not "done" when I bought it.

I drove my '79 Supra for 2 years with no thermostat installed to keep the temps down (it had repeated head gasket / overheating issues) and no functioning rear brakes.  It had weird screw-in pistons in back that seized up and couldn't be retracted for new pads.  Being Supra-only they were NLA even in 1989.  Other than that it was pretty solid.

[edit]  Thinking back on the Supra, I'm pretty sure the speedo was out.  I know the odo was.  By my calculations it had about 300,000 miles on it when I sold it for $500 in 1995 after 6+ years as my daily.  Oh, and the wiper motor had a plastic gear that broke and rendered them immobile.  It was also a Supra-only unit and apparently a genetic problem because every Supra in every junk yard within 100 miles was missing the wiper motor.  The regular Celica wiper motor could be modified to physically fit but it didn't have an intermittent setting so you had to move the control stalk quickly past the intermittent setting or it would blow the fuse or burn the motor.

The sketchiest thing I have ever seen on public roads was when I was a kid in the early '70s.  We lived in a small rural village and one afternoon my friend (also a car kid) and I heard a really loud V8.  Really loud.  We looked up to see what was probably a C1 Corvette roadster in grey primer, no doors, no interior, go by with two guys sitting on loose milk crates in it.  I kid you not the driver was steering with 2 pairs of vice grips clamped onto the steering shaft.  In my memory it had the windshield frame cut off entirely or at least no glass, but I can't be sure about that.

They weren't putting along, either.

I admit, I didn't do much of the driving, but still some pretty sketchy stuff.

Before my job here at GRM, I worked at one of those nationwide used car dealerships (side note: I'm a terrible salesperson), and one evening, a young man came in and wanted to drive a C6 ZR1.

Naturally, my gut told me no, but I didn't want to come off like a jerk and who knows, maybe he can actually pay for it.

Anyway, employees are the only ones allowed to drive cars off of the lot. I'd like to point out that yes, I can drive a car with a manual transmission, but not very well as I don't drive cars with manuals very often.

So the sketchy part started when I had to get this very expensive sports car off of the lot and through a timed gate that will close regardless of what's in the way. Naturally, I stall it repeatedly getting off the lot.

Now I hand the young man the keys, and he's driving. We round a corner, and he puts his foot into it. A little scary, yeah, but the kicker here is that someone who drove it before us had traction control turned off.

So yeah. That kid totaled a relatively new C6 ZR1 Corvette. Thankfully no one was hurt.

I drove a mid 80s F600 bucket truck for work a decade ago. It was a short wheelbase utility truck that had been put out to pasture (literally) before the company owner "got a great deal" on it. I rebuilt the old aftermarket Holley 2bbl on the gas 370 big block to make it run well enough to get it out of the company lot. It had one functional rear brake, the other rear wheel cylinder just purged brake fluid when you hit the brakes. It backfired when you shut it off like a hand grenade and I could never adjust it better. It had a bad tendency to shut off and not restart, usually when I was 30' up in the bucket and working by myself. I literally called a local friend to come and jumpstart the truck several times when I found myself stranded. The wheels were so out of round that at 55 it felt like it was leaving the ground at regular intervals, and I only got it to 60 once on a day when I had little attachment to seeing the following sunrise. No AC (of course) and no working vents. The hot defrost was stuck on. All the shifter linkages were worn out on the 4 speed so gear selection was an educated guess. It had one headlight.

I drove that truck a couple days a week running service calls for about 2 years. 

Probably the salvage E36 I bought for parts. It had a blown head gasket and I got it cheap. I took off what I wanted and then realized I could probably make it work. I did and then drove it for a little while with a steering rack so loose it would death wobble on the freeway.

I havent had that many terrible experiences.

Wait, I found a photo of the Cheap Jeep! The only known photo, I believe. 

Holy E36 M3.  I thought my ZJ was getting a bit sketchy these days, but nope, compared to that thing, it's in perfect working order. 

1981 subaru DL wagon MT 4WD 

bought it for $100 

didn't have third gear 

drove it 4 years as is. 

68k Miles

got rear ended 

insurance gave me $3700 

sold it $800 

My 86 Camaro.

It'd been sitting about 15 years due to it being my mothers car but my brothers 'project' so it was gutted for a floor repair mostly. I took over when it could no longer roll, so I did the front calipers and got the carb rebuilt, and took it for a test drive.

A gutted interior meant hearing everything kicked up going down the road, then the fuel gauge failed and the speedometer starts to jump around when you get above 80km/h, oh and the catalytic converter was so plugged that if the car ran for to long it was setting the grass on fire...

I still have it, but I've cut the exhaust off for safety measures (it has a makeshift single side pipe now) and I need to get it into the shop to start on some repairs before taking it out again. 

I had a '67 Triumph TR-4A in college...where do I start.  I had to do a nut and bolt weekly to monthly, but still pieces would randomly fall off.  It wasn't uncommon for people to drive up next to you and comment that you were leaving a trail of parts.

What else...the doors would come open under hard cornering.  Once one of the wire wheels broke most of it's wires under cornering, and once I tried to back up a steep drive and the splines on the rear wheels stripped, rendering it motionless.  Another time I turned on the wipers only for them both to disappear into the night in unison.  Then there was the time the right front suspension broke with the wheel ending up on the hood of the car, and the time the IRS diff bracket broke at speed with the rear wheels ending up high in the well and sparks dragging along the back.

For maintenance, I always had to keep spare voltage regulators and generator brushes, as well as head gaskets and fuel filters and a fuel pump.  All of those at one point had been changed on the side of the road.  I am sure I am forgetting many other foibles..and yes, I miss it.  

Actual car back in the day.

My '89 Chevy pickup had well over a half turn of play in the steering and almost no brakes when I test drove it from the car lot. Bought it cheap because the motor ran sweet didn't leak and had a 4speed manual that would never have issues. 

Drove it home after rush hour traffic and fixed everything. Brake and front end parts are cheap and fast repairs.

Dude I knew in college bought a '78 Ford F100 (this took place in '98 so it was 30 years old at the time) because "old trucks are cool" but didn't know how to wrench or even what he really owned.  Had me test drive it once, said that "it drives pretty good, I just want to see what you think".

Steering was extremely shot, well over 90 degrees of free play in the steering wheel before anything happened at the knuckles, and "the brakes require a pump or two to build pressure before you start slowing down" told to me after we were already rolling.  I think I made it three blocks before I pulled into a parking lot and said I was done driving it.  Just keeping it in one lane going straight at 25mph was an involved process.  

This was when I started to figure out it either takes a ton of hands on work, yards of money, or a mixture of both to get a vehicle like that returned to like-new driving condition.  

rslifkin said:

Holy E36 M3.  I thought my ZJ was getting a bit sketchy these days, but nope, compared to that thing, it's in perfect working order. 

Oh, it was really bad and really stupid. If I didn't have a 3 mile commute, I would have kicked it to the curb immediately. I drove the Miata in the summer, and in the winter I don't really go anywhere than to work and home. 

I also forgot that turning the volume knob up on the factory radio turned the volume up, and turning the volume knob down also turned the volume up. Usually. So I got the volume about where I wanted it and then adjusted it up or down by sliding all the equalizer levers up or down.

I had to borrow it back from my father once when my Subaru Baja blew a brake line. Aaand I had to drive it to go meet my girlfriend's parents for the first time. Not the strongest first impression when I wheeled up in a rotted-out Jeep with a mismatched door and parts held on with duct tape. When I took it back I noticed that it had a front wheel bearing making a hideous noise and warned him that that thing was going to kill him. A week later he told me that it had started pulling really badly in one direction when he hit the brakes and I knew what had happened. Looked under it and the one lower control arm was no longer attached to the body.

My beloved highway warrior bucket truck. 4 wheel drums. Leaky wheel seals, 1/2 turn of the wheel before anything happens zero power the list can go on. 

Replica Benz 1886 motor wagen.

Top speed is about 15mph and scary as all hell. 

Turning a corner, headed downhill is terrifying.

I had a 1967 Opel Kadette station wagon, the only car I ever bought in the dark.    When examined in daylight I found that major parts of the body had been repaired using plastic mini-toboggans, pop riveted in place and covered with bondo.  The A post on the driver's door was so rusty that eventually that door would actually fall off if I opened it, so I had to use the passenger door to get in and out.  That door eventually froze shut, and then I had to crawl in through the tailgate hatch which could only be opened with a large screwdriver.

However, it always started no matter how cold it was outside, and it got me to work every day through a long, snowy winter.

Definitely Datsaniti during its first $2000 Challenge. 

• Just got it running the few weeks before. The first autocross run was the furthest it had driven...ever.
• Ran out of gas on 2nd autocross run because the freshly-fabricated tank had never been filled up after welding.
• Electrical and computers were just kinda zip-tied in place
• No alignment since the subframe fabrication
• Single circuit brakes, no proportioning (basically zero front brakes)
• Widebody was only tack-welded on, contstantly flapping in the wind
• Rust openings. It's not even fair to call them holes.
• Low-hanging low-effort exhaust, scraped everything
• Rear sway bar link was broken
• I mean just look at it

I guess I'd have to pick two. My first car, and my "first" car.

The first actual car was a 1989 Ford Escort, powder blue, with a terrible electrical drain somewhere in the system. So we unhooked the battery any time it was going to sit more than a day. I didn't drive it very much, I was 16 and rode the bus to school, but my dad drove it some. He patched holes in the floorboards with sheetmetal, pop rivets, and some kind of viscous black rustproofing sludge.

The one time I do remember driving it turned out to be the last time. I guess I was feeling rebellious or something (this was after my parents split up) and so I decided to go on an "adventure" and took it out for a drive with no particular plan. I ended up:

lost
at a Walmart in the town north of us (I bought an embarrassing CD there)
lost in the rain
drove too fast down a looping on-ramp and went straight into the grass, fortunately not making it all the way to the highway
lost in the rain and the dark
took a wrong turn at a fork in the road, left would've coincidentally taken me towards home, I went right
the car started to overheat and I pulled over

By this time, I was totally overwhelmed and exasperated and scared. I started walking back the way I came, hoping to find somewhere I could identify with an address and then call home to get help. I had a borrowed cell phone but I didn't want to call when I couldn't say where I was with any certainty. Well, mom called me first, and somehow was able to ascertain my general location, and came and got me. The car ended up getting towed later. It was apparently a bad water pump that did it in, and it went to the scrapyard, to be replaced by a bizarro version of itself, a 1988 Chevy Nova in powder blue that never ran and sat in our garage until it, too, was cut up for scrap. (My mom's boyfriend had some hand in bringing this abomination home and I denounce all knowledge of it.)

My "first" car was the first car I actually used on a regular basis, a 1998 Ford Taurus in dark green. (My plea to my grandma to buy me a 1992 Mercury Cougar XR7 from ebay was rejected and she got me this instead.) Now, this car was perfectly fine when we got it. Not special or cool, but a functional appliance of a car. No, the sketchiness accrued gradually over several years of ownership. To attempt to summarize:

A deer jumped in front of me and mashed up the hood and the plastic radiator support; this part actually got fixed nicely by insurance so it pales in comparison to the rest
I spun it on some slush and hit a farmer's barbed wire fence, scraping up the front bumper slightly
A Bronco backed into me in the Kmart parking lot and cracked the side of the rear bumper
I backed it into a picnic table at my friend's house by being a dumbass and broke the taillight (I later swapped the broken one and the good one for 1996-spec taillights from the junkyard, thus gaining sweet amber turn signals)
I misjudged the angle while parking at work one morning and smashed in the right rear door on the bumper of my boss's truck (he wasn't too mad since i only added some paint to his chrome bumper)
The rear brakes would lock up bad in the snow and I spun it more than once, this could have been also due to bald rear tires
I discovered that it burned a lot of oil when the oil light came on one day and I had to add 4 quarts to get it back to full (later I went on a road trip to Philadelphia and had to add oil during the trip; this has become a recurring theme in my life)
The turn signals quit working completely one winter and then started working again in the spring (the check engine light also did a similar thing)
In case the body wasn't mangled enough, I lost control in the snow (again, a recurring theme here) and overcorrected and slid sideways into someone's yard and took out their gas meter with the driver's door; the fire department and police were there, it was a fun time, the car got towed, it was mostly cosmetic damage but we had the underneath checked out and they might've replaced the oil pan or something I forget
Pretty sure it leaked coolant real bad too
eventually I sold it to a friend for 500 bucks and he drove it until the coolant thing got out of hand or something

So yeah, a lot of self-inflicted wounds there. And deferred maintenance. And Ford oil/coolant/turn-signal problems. Recurring themes in my life. *sigh*

The $25 Turismo I bought from a "friend". Typical Michigan vehicle with plenty of rust and barely held together yet drove. Just changes the location of it and sold it for $150.

The front end smash 86 Turbo Coupe Tbird I drove home for $400.... eventually got scraped and that motor is now in between the fenders in Project D2D.

A good one that my father tells is working for a family friend of ours' logging business in the late '70s. They had an old mid '60s Ford F-700 with a stake rack. It had a a number of mechanical issues, but most notably the cab mounts had all rotted out of it and the cab settled over the frame, so our friend Leigh jacked the cab up and crammed a bunch of chunks of 2x4s under the corners to hold the cab up. My father talks about the last time he drove it, he hit a bad bump in the road, the cab popped up, all the chunks of wood fell out, and the cab settled down on the frame. When it did that, the misalignment bound up all the linkages for the steering, clutch, shifter, brake and throttle. He had to cut the ignition off and just coast to a stop. They then had to jack the cab back up, gather all the chunks of wood scattered along the road and try and get it all aligned to get home.

Another story, borrowed from my friend Scott, who commented on the same Jalopnik article that inspired this. I remember the van but I never had the "pleasure" of driving it.

"Our SCCA club van. It was a 1970's(?) GM bread van, that we still used until fairly recently (like 2016/2017)

None of the dashboard gauges worked. Fuel gauge was "just make sure the 5 gallon jerry can was full as a backup". Speedometer was kinda useless anyways, since top speed was well below the flow of traffic. Anything over 55 would be just too scary anyways, as steering control wasn't exactly precise. Temp gauge was basically "if it starts smoking, add some water".

It was an automatic transmission, but had no indicator. You shifted by counting the clicks in the gear selector, and slowly releasing the brake to see which direction you rolled. It did have a nice Hurst short shift lever someone donated, but it only came up to your ankle, so you couldn't really reach it without halfway climbing out of the drivers seat.

Speaking of the drivers seat - yeah it wasn't really connected. I mean it was securely bolted to the floor panel with four bolts. But that floor panel had a pretty good crack 3/4ths of the way around the mount (it was one of those "post" type seats). You could visibly see the seat mount/floor flex anytime you shifted your weight. I'm sure that was a great thing to have in a vehicle where you drove with the drivers door open to avoid heat stroke.

At one point it stranded someone because the radiator fell out going down the highway. The radiator support brackets had long since rotted out, but the trim pieces and the radiator hoses did a decent job for a while. The radiator was then replaced, and secured with zip ties. That's also when we learned the "add some water when it starts smoking" solution was fruitless, because the coolant overflow we kept toping off, wasn't actually attached to the cooling system.

Some other noteworthy additions was that the gas pedal was missing. The post it mounted to was still there though, so you could just push down on the stick poking up out of the floor to accelerate. There was also a wasps nest in the storage compartment where the drivers sun visor would typically be. That was obviously removed, but at least one trip was completed with it intact.

Needless to say, I was ready to condemn it when the shop finally told us that the front suspension mounts had rotted out on the frame, and that there just wasn't enough frame left to reattach anything in a usable fashion.

 It actually had a pretty nice aluminum body. It's just the important parts that were failing. When it came time to replace it, the club was very short on funding, so a generous member actually overpaid for it to help the club out. He still has it in his lot, and is using it as a storage shed. For that purposes, it's actually not a bad solution (if you have understanding neighbors)."

I used to tow mt race cars with an old Chrysler station wagon with a 383 and tons of miles on it.

One day the transmission gave up half way through Oregon, on the way home to Vancouver. We abandoned it but first we fired it up and put a rock on the accelerator to see what would happen (we were young and pissed off).  Nothing - it just went to whatever its peak rpm was and sat there until it ran out of gas.

We saluted it as we drove away in the rental truck we hired nearby to take us and the race car home (it was an interesting discussion at the border "The car on the trailer has no plate on it and the truck is registered in the US and  (this was long before the need for passports) your driver's license is Canadian..."

Many years ago, I did some side work for a guy that had the maintenance contract on some local fleet trucks.  He had hurt his back and needed help with many of the jobs.  His 'work truck' was a late 70s Ford Highboy 4x4.  Short wheel base, big lift, service bed that was waaay overloaded.  Built 429 big block, manual trans, marginal brakes, and 'nautical' steering.  Driving it was like sitting on one of those spring mounted ducks you see in playgrounds, only it had 400+hp and probably weighed 9000lbs.  Had some seriously frightening moments, but managed to survive.

At some point in this relationship, the same guy 'paid' me with a 1978 Mercury Grand Marquis coupe...  it was sketchy enough on its own, having taken a palm tree across the trunk at some point.  It ran and drove though.  I intended to use the 460 and C6 in a drag Fox Mustang, but it never happened and I sold the car eventually...