What's The WORST car you've ever owned.

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Interwired

Post by Interwired »

hmmm..let me see..
1983 Ford Escort 1.3 laser. - [xx(]
Many, Many years ago. That car was an embarassment to ford...and thats saying something.
Two blown engines !
1. very dodgy fitted gearbox, meant that each gear was at a severe angle. This resulting in a gear change from 4th to 1st, at 70mph, and before I could dip the clutch - Bang, Clatter, screech.
2. Travelling along Quiet country road at night, revs take a sudden drop, and within seconds the front wheels are locked. Coast it to side of road, and find oil spewed all over car. Sudden oil leak - Engine seized.
3. I take car for its Mot. After extensive welding to severe rust holes in the boot, it passes. 2 weeks later it goes to Mechanic for a service. Mechanic finds front n/s wheel is barely held on. Car had been in a bad crash, and was a write off, and there was no way a Mot tester would not of seen it !
Its amazing Im still alive today !
mark_sp
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Post by mark_sp »

A Rover SD1 2600, 4 years old and with lowish mileage. It would take me far to long to recount all the problems but within 18 months the car had completely self destructed and almost taken my sanity with it. On a quiet day you could hear the car gently dissolving into the atmosphere and it remains to this day the only car I've ever owned where the roof went rusty. 18mpg and requiring a tune up every 1500 miles, no sorry Its just too painfull to go on.
mark_sp
JohnD
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Post by JohnD »

I spent some time recently looking through some workshop manuals of vehicles I've owned over the years. Some people would say this was the worst car I'd ever owned. It was a 1954 Singer Hunter. The design of the engine was unusual in that it had an overhead camshaft. At the time, pushrods were the norm. The maintenance schedule went like this. Every 1000 miles 8 steering nipples require greasing. Every 5000 miles 4 wheel hubs, water pump, trackroad ends and propeller shaft requires greasing. Also every 5000 miles,the oil was changed and the filter cleaned. But the filter was a mesh basket attached to the oil pump in the sump. The pay-off from all this maintenance was that wheel bearings, trackrod ends and water pumps never needed replacing. So was it the worst car I've ever owned? ------- I wish I had it now!
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Post by alan s »

There's always one!!
When I owned a Driving School for a while it came with a thing called a Holden Torana (4 cylinder.) which had an Opel 1.9 motor fitted. Went OK but the way it worked if you wanted to stay in business, was that you replaced cars every 23 months. The Torana had been good, no argument there, so I eventually changed it to a similar vehicle, by now a bit fancier & called a "Sunbird." What a dog...
Driving it home on the highway and as I rounded a curve I heard a "ping" and upon looking in the mirror watched as a truck ran over the chrome strip off the passengers door; that was the beginning of some real headaches. It had several wheel alignments, nothing keeps you on your toes as much as a learner driver in thick traffic driving a car that pulls towards the centre of the road except perhaps one with that problem and brakes that also pull to the right[:0][V] brakes that bound up so if you lifted your foot off the accelerator the car simply stopped ("What have I done!! the car's stopping, we're going downhill & I haven't touched the brakes!!!!!!!!!" to quote many a learner) it wouldn't go into first gear unless you rode the clutch so as to get the car moving & then double de-clutched back into first, the diff spent more time out of the car than in it, fuel consumption at around 13 mpg on a run & 9 mpg around town, new set of plugs every 1500 klms, a foot operated 'handbrake' that occasionally jammed on & wouldn't release unless it was levered from under the car, and a pile of other things I can no longer remember (your brain makes you forget nightmares they reckon) but THE BEST BIT IS....according to the service manager at the joint where I bought it, "it is within General Motors acceptable standards." WOW!!! that made me real happy to know that. Eventually, I took a girl out for a lesson one day who asked if I could wait to see her father when I arrived back at her place; it turned out that he was a service manager at another GM franchise & the girl reckoned she'd never been in a worse car. The father arranged to have the car at his garage for a week & go through it which he did & I must admit it was a fair bit more pleasant to drive after that.
Circumstances had changed so I decided to sell the Driving School & I was lucky enough for a GM enthusiast to buy it, in fact my vehicles were so striking appearancewise, as soon as he knew which school it was he was into it (There is a God after all). By now it had done almost it's 20,000klms in almost 5 months so I took it to our AA equivalent for a "pre-warranty expiry test" so that I couuld hand the car over to the buyer with a clear conscience. Again they turned up a list of things to be done so I took it back to the service company & then back for a re-test to check all was up to scratch. I asked the guy doing the inspection "off the record" what his opinion of the car was, to which he replied "if it was a second hand car & you were thinking of buying it, I'd strongly recommend against it." nice to know it wasn't just me!!
As a footnote: The buyer of the school had got rid of the car within 6 months of buying it. When I asked him why, it seems that he discovered a gearbox in it "Made in the Phillipines" had a string of other problems that I hadn't encountered including 4 burnt out intake valves "you mean exhaust don't you?" NO...INTAKE..never heard of that before and neither had he.
Based on that, you'd have to wonder the value of FSH...in this case FSH stood for "Fairly $***ty Holden." [:o)][}:)][:p]
Alan S
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Post by tomsheppard »

There was a Ford Taunus 20M I had in Denmark that was awful and a Visa Diesel that nearly got me home from the vendor's before disintegrating. The Skoda was ok by comparison and the Reliant Kitten was not a good car but at least it had character. No, the Mark one Scirocco was the worst. Despite absorbing the national debt of a large third world nation, The bits cost a fortune and it neither went, stopped or steered. A Dell'Orto carb and a Janspeed exhaust gave me no MPH improvement, The brakes were supposedly as good as new but were rotten stoppers and it wasn't even reliable. I callled it The Virgin - I never seemed to get far with it.
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Post by Dave Bamber »

I've owned some cr[;)]p in me time but the worst has to a Hillman Avenger. What a heap. Within a week of ownership, the heater radiator went which combined with the smelly carpets made the interior smell like an India takaway[V] It was flat out at 50mph so I advanced the timing and discovered it was retarded cos the crankshaft rattled for fun. I kept it for about 3 months and finally did a swop with an old boy for his Fiat 127[}:)][;)]. I thought I'd got rid of all me troubles then discovered the fiat needed 2 bits of welding, all down one side and all the way up the other.......[:0][B)][:o)]
The spelling monster strikes again.......
philbar
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Post by philbar »

the xm v6 sei... the money pit... no words are bad enough for it the heap of junk....french rolls royce?no way more like the french yugo..
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