The life of a car enthusiast is one often filled with fun, joy, and perhaps freedom. Every once in a while, everything goes wrong and you find yourself in a pit of automotive despair. Autopian? Yes, but also it’s Autopain. This is your automotive rock bottom, a situation so bad that you couldn’t fathom a way for things to get worse. Don’t worry, friend, because we’ve all been there. What was your automotive rock bottom?
What many people consider to be the peak of my Gambler 500 shenanigans was also my automotive rock bottom. Let’s flip those calendars back to 2019 …
My trusty Smart Fortwo had just completed its third Gambler 500 rally. I also bought one of my first four-wheeled vehicles that wasn’t a Smart, a 2000 Ford Ranger with four-wheel-drive and the mighty 4.0-liter V6. The Ranger was supposed to carry the Gambler torch from the Smart, because off-road endurance rallies are hard on a little city car.
I gave the Ranger a whole theme, too, calling it the “White Claw Rascue.” The idea was that I’d find people in need of White Claw and give them a drink. Look, my alcohol tastes aren’t great. The hood had “Drink White Claw” backward, so when you looked in your mirror and saw me coming it would read correctly.
That Ranger was a great truck until it wasn’t. After its first and only Gambler 500 run, the automatic transmission’s shifting behavior became bizarre. It would shift gears only when you manually shifted using the column; the transmission was incapable of shifting by itself when the shifter was in drive. The engine also couldn’t idle while in gear. Instead, the engine fluctuated 500 RPM and sometimes stalled. (I later found out the transmission control module’s wires were rubbing on sharp metal, tearing their insulation and causing the TCM to short out.) I couldn’t afford to fix the truck, so I sold it and bought my next project, a Ford Festiva.
I removed the Festiva’s doors, windows, and tailgate before turning it into a discount go-kart. The idea was that the Festiva would be my Gambler 500 car and I’d daily my Smart as usual.
Then the Smart’s alternator seized, tearing up the serpentine belt and stranding the car at home. Sure, I had two other Smarts at the time, but one had windows that were jammed open and the other had a titling issue. That left me with having to fix the original Smart. Unfortunately, every quote I got on alternator replacement was far too expensive for me to afford back then. So, I made one really bad choice: Drive the rally kart. I scrapped the doors, so I couldn’t even put them back on.
I did just that, driving an open-air Ford Festiva through a Chicago winter with a leaky gas tank, a rust hole surrounding the rear axle, and exactly no heat. I drove that car through snowstorms and had to shovel snow out of the interior. To this day, that Festiva was the only car I had to scrape both the inside and the outside of the windshield. I would have ridden a motorcycle on the better days, but at the time I had 6 bikes and none of them ran.
Daily driving my terrible rally kart build made me a bit of a local celebrity, with even the CEO of the company I worked for saying he was jealous that I drove such cool cars. Nobody knew the misery of my daily commute! Thankfully, the car blew a rusty brake line, blew a rusty fuel line, and killed itself in a pond at an off-road park. I replaced it with my first ever Volkswagen, a 2005 Passat TDI wagon with a horrible boost leak. I had hit automotive rock bottom so hard that another broken car with a 60 mph acceleration time of 43 seconds and a top speed of 67 mph was a spectacular upgrade.
I finally pulled out of my automotive slump when I started collecting dream cars starting in 2020.
What’s your automotive rock bottom? How bad has your car ownership experience gotten?
I’m admittedly an automotive princess, so the most catastrophic wasn’t that bad. It was probably the time MR2 spun a rod bearing on the dyno before she’d ever even left the shop. I knew it was bad news when I picked up the phone and it was the shop owner calling instead of my bestie and he just said I needed to come down. When they told me I just kinda leaned against the lift cause I felt like I was gonna pass out. She had come so close to being done. Luckily it was survivable. But seriously, Lucretia has probably put me through the most pain out of all my cars which is odd since she’s the weird Toyota in a herd of Italians.
When my SHO caught fire so many times I lost count, every repair bill was over 1k to parts rarity, the radiator exploding in a spectacular fashion.
Pretty much traded it in for 500 for a much more reliable car.
My lowest point spanned a little over two years and for any of the former Jalopnik readers, some of this might seem familiar.
In early 2016, I blew the motor on my 2001 E46 after a miss-shift on the way home from work one night. I was driving angry, pissed at my boss, and well… yeah. Not my proudest moment, but that ended up snowballing into my lowest ownership point I’ve ever hit. I lied about why the motor blew when I took it to a BMW specialist because I was so upset at myself. It was toast, needed a new block.
My dad had just bought a new Cx5 and offered his old 2000 Ford Explorer to me until I bought something else. The truck was already reaching it’s end of life near and had 200k miles. Slowly but surely things started to fall apart. Nearly every single door handle on it broke at one point, I had to open the back passenger side door to get inside to open the drivers door. I rigged up a metal bar directly to the door mechanism to open it, eventually. I mostly left my window down to make things easier. The speakers were falling apart (not sure how that happened), the paint was fading rapidly, and to make matters worse, what was a relatively clean bodied Explorer got heavily damaged because a guy blew a stop sign 200ft from my house and I hit him. The fuel gauge broke mid-drive and I ran out of fuel in traffic too.
I drove it in it’s dilapidated state for over a year.
Eventually, the headgasket blew. My buddy and I ended up doing a full HG replacement on the street in-front of his house. But at that point the damage was done and it never ran right again.
Fast forward a few weeks, I’m still driving the beat down Explorer when suddenly a different buddy tells me about a free car some resident at the community he worked at was giving away. It was a 1988 Celica in near mint condition.
Great I thought, I ended up picking it up within a day. It was great, albeit the slowest car I’ve ever driven. Unfortunately, this car ended up spinning a rod bearing 10 months later, so at this point I was once again without a running car.
I finally sucked it up and bought a brand new manual Corolla Hatch… which started giving me issues the week I bought it, but that’s another story for another time.
I think my Dakota smoking so badly they closed off my street for fear of it going up in flames is the pinnacle of how bad my car ownership experience was at one point. Right at rush hour and the same day college kids were coming back are coming to start their first semester? Oh, what fun.
And I’m only on car #2.
Owned a 93 sonoma, i, after a few early mishaps called jinxy, because i swear it was not only a jinx to fix things, im pretty sure it tried to be a pickup version of christine.
Between the randomly shutting off at oncoming traffic while turning, throttle sticking wide open while trying to stop, either door opening while turning trying to dump me or passengers out, heater core exploding in the middle of winter and finding the floors were gone under the carpet courtesy of driving through puddles.
It also felt the need to end its life by lighting itself on fire in my driveway with the fire dept taking 4 tries to finally get the fire out.
The curse lived on after i sold the wheels and tires to a guy with another s10, whose engine blew up 2 weeks after putting them on.
For such a hateful truck that was homicidal, then suicidal, the radio always did work rather well.
Had to laugh out loud because scraping the inside of the windshield was a low point for me, too! I had one of my infamous horrible ideas to buy a 1976 Celica GT that needed a salvage title to get back on the road. I dumped the money into it to get it running (even went as far as having the A/C retrofitted and charged up to make it “civilized”) but like most of those Celicas, it had some rust and did a bad job keeping the elements out. Plus the gas gauge was more of a rough-guess gauge.
It’s hard to pin down my exact low point though, because at least the Celica looked cool with its yellow paint and lots of weird brown/red stripes. My ’65 Corvair was an even worse daily, especially when I replace the frunk (hood?) with a straighter hood that was bright yellow while the rest of the car was red. Also, my old hood was bent because the car had hit something, so the new, straight, yellow hood did not look straight on a bent car. Every moment of vapor lock in the summer or freezing my butt off in the winter or carrying around a pan to put under it so it didn’t leak oil in the parking garage at work… all low points. Still. Fun car. Loved it.
Might also have to pick my ’94 Trans Am with its finicky LT-1 that, in spite of lots of TLC, randomly threw a rod while my wife and I were driving it on an anniversary getaway.
Maybe it was every time I saw a puddle in the backseat of my ’89 Firebird because those t-tops never sealed right from the factory. Or every time the pop-up headlights failed after a fresh motor rebuild…
Maybe it was my ’87 Bronco that I dumped a bunch of cash into dropping a used 5.0 into it only to find out the transmission was totally borked.
I promise I do make some good decisions. You should see my Miata.
My first car was 94 camaro, it was bitchin (not really) in late 2006 it was a rough time though. I was finishing up my associate degree and my girlfriend at the time broke up with me in it. I was pretty heartbroken and depressed. Fast forward a few months and in Jan of 2007 I blew a head gasket. I got it fixed but it was never the same again. Plus too many mixed memories. I had some good and a bad in that car. But that January was the low point.
I was working my full time job at that point making money and when you’re single you really only have to worry about your own finances so I scraped up enough money to buy a Ninja 250. I put 12000 miles on that bike that year. By the end of 2007 I switched to a Cavalier Coupe. I just worked hard that year and focused on myself to get out of a rut.
We used to have a car called “La misteriosa” because it was full of mysteries and you never knew if it was going to work or not. It was a 1998 Suzuki Baleno (the car they cast for the role of “piece of crap” for Better Call Saul) that barely got my family and I through our first year in Puerto Rico.
When we bought it it had no working windows, no working locks, 3/5 doors worked, and it refused to start literally the moment after we bought it home. I think this car was stolen by someone who hated it. It had a jerry-rigged ignition that stuck out of a hole under the dash and used a safe key. The wiring, the wiring, it seemed like someone tried fixing one thing, then got mad and started ripping wires out. It leaked every fluid for the whole time we had and I’m not sure why it ran when it did. It wasn’t the kind of car for a young family to make a good impression with.
It died on me so many times, like when I picked up my sister at the airport for her first visit to my new life. One time we had to ride in it on the back of a tow truck because it died on us going up a hill to see a festival. To my wife’s annoyance, it would come back to life under the deft care of a mechanic who was cutting us deals on the work because he liked the way I treat my daughter. I got all the windows to work and 4/5 doors to open, and a bunch of other stuff done before it died on a hill around the corner from my house.
I still fell in love with that car. I learned a lot from having to fix it. I never want to own it again though.
In February of 2006, newly into my first teaching job, I did what
everybody shouldonly a hopeless moron would do when they finally get two nickels to rub together for the first time. With a poorly paying job, and absolutely no savings, I commited 25% of my take home pay to buying a fast car. I bought a CPO 2004 Pontiac GTO with 5200 miles on it. Yep I was a realsmart fellerfart smeller. When I took it home to show my parents, my mom gave me a hug and said, “It’s nice to finally see you do something stupid. You’ve been 40 years old since you were 12.”I’ve never felt buyer’s remorse like I felt driving home that night. It was like the core of my being knew what was coming. That car would end up being the very definition of a lemon, or a Friday car, or whatever you would call a steaming pile of unreliable shit. Over the course of the next 3-1/2 months, it would spend 31 days out of service for various maladies. Some common to the GTO platform, some just bizarre.
By May of that year, a pattern had developed. Something would break over the weekend. I would drop it off at the dealer. I’d get it back on Thursday, and then something else would break over the weekend. One Monday it had made it through the weekend unbroken! I decided to wash it, but first I stopped at a Jeep dealer to test drive an LJ Wrangler.
You see, by this point I was losing sleep over the GTO. I was going to be moving to a new town for another job soon. A place where I knew nobody, and traveled between buildings during the day. I would need a reliable car. I loved the GTO. It was the nicest, coolest, fasted thing I’d ever owned (and still is to this day), but deep down I knew I couldn’t trust it anymore.
The LJ Wrangler, which I also knew deep down would be an unwise choice, did nothing to inspire me, so I went to leave the dealership. The GTO fired up, and then it died. Then it fired up again, and immediately died. Then the cluster flashed “Fuel gauge error, consult dealer,” and refused to crank over again.
I called roadside assistance. While waiting I called my mom to vent. Upon hearing where I was, she made me promise not to do anything stupid, like make a deal on a Jeep. I promised her I wouldn’t (the Jeep dealer had pissed me off something fierce, but that’s another story). I paced back and forth furiously for the better part of an hour ranting when the truck finally showed up. At that point, the manager of the Jeep dealer came out and tried to convince me to leave the car there and do a deal with him. I’m not sure how I managed to be nice to him, but I did. I was actually too mad, and too defeated, to deal with his bullshit. The tow truck driver hauled the car off, but since I lived 12 miles in the wrong direction, left me there stranded.
I only knew two the phone numbers of people in the little podunk town I was teaching in, and neither one of them answered. This was way before Uber, and there were no taxis or public transportation. I ended up calling a friend from college who lived an hour away. He and his girlfriend came and rescued me. I took them out to dinner to thank them.
The next day I walked to school (thankfully a short walk), and had to BEG the dealership to send a porter out the 35 miles to come get me to pick up my loaner after school. I went shopping for the GTO’s replacement in my loaner car. This time I wanted a brand new vehicle, so the lemon law would apply in case I got another piece of shit.
On Thursday I got the GTO back with a new ECU. I picked up a buddy of mine with his camera, and went out and did the first and only burnout I’ve ever done to punish the GTO for what it had done to my psyche. The next day I left work a little early, and picked up the 2006 GMC Sierra that I’m still daily driving to this day.
By chance, do you or did you also own a ’71 GTO project car?
Nope. That’s the only Pontiac I’ve ever owned.
Thanks. I thought you might have been someone I knew because everything else in the above writeup fit.
That’s strangely comforting to hear that someone else had a similar experience. I always talk to the owners when I see a GTO, and none of them have had the kind of trouble I had.
November 1996: the Dodge Colt I was driving decided it didn’t want to run properly in temperatures below 50F. This was a problem, as I lived in downtown Minneapolis. I scraped together $400 and bought a 1985 Chevy Cavalier with a failing starter and a clogged heater core.
Thanksgiving: with a new starter installed and the cooling system flushed, the little Cav ran flawlessly from Minnesota to Chicago, where my dad took one look at the bald tires on it and took me to Sam’s Club for 4 new tires, calling it my Christmas present. I didn’t complain.
December 26, 1996: It was -40F at 7AM when I got up to go to work. The Cavalier didn’t want to start, but cranked OK. I remember hearing that sometimes old TBI systems like an open throttle in the cold. I push the gas oedal to the floor, the car starts right up… and the gas pedal stays frozen to the floor. I shut the car off, free up the throttle linkage, and restart it… now with a pronounced tick.
The tick becomes a knock as I make my way across town to the service station where I work. After hours, I pull the car into the bay, drop the oil pan to look at the bearings, and confirm that the number 1 rod bearing has spun, blocking the oil flow. Full of hope, I procure and install a new rod bearing, button everything back up, and fill it with fresh oil.
December 28: it starts knocking again. Unwilling to lose my brand-new tires, I check the thrifties for another car they might fit. I find another ’85 Cavalier, with damage to the left-front corner, though it runs fine. I buy it for $200.
January 3, 1997: I take both cars to a friend’s house in Stillwater, since my boss at the garage won’t let me swap engines at work. We poke and prod, and decide it would actually be better to fix the smashed car with the front clip from the knocking car. I drive home, feeling smug.
January 20 or so: I pack up and head back down for Chicago, to have a belated Christmas with family. I get as far as just past Hudson, WI when smoke starts pouring out of the back of the car, and I lose power. A valve spring has broken, rendering the “good” Cav’s engine useless. I limp it back to my friend’s house, hoping to pull the head off the other engine, but he convinces me to cut my losses and just scrap them both. I leave in a 1978 Chevy Nova that one of his friends sells me for $300 plus the titles to the two Cavaliers.
The Nova is a whole other can of worms. But this is long enough already.
1992- I had a minimum wage job, desperate for a car, so I started driving an inherited 77 Triumph TR-7. Worst car ever. It would overheat and die at the drop of a hat, IN THE WINTER. The last straw was when it died at the low point of an underpass 4 or so miles from work at 10 pm in a snowstorm. Couldn’t push it uphill either way to bump start it. Finally gave up and walked to work. Got a coworker to take me back at lunch and it fired right up. I got rid of it a week later and started riding a Yamaha 125 to and from. Yes that winter sucked.
Push-starting the Z4 Flintstones style, one foot out the open driver’s door so I could pop the clutch and get it running wasn’t exactly a highlight, I can say that. Can’t even remember what was wrong with the Sentra at that point. Statistically, it’s most likely my gf at the time was driving it because she had let her Mazdaspeed3 go so long being treated so badly it wasn’t running. The ZX-6R was somewhere at that point, but maybe I wasn’t really riding it yet?
Plus, despite the low center of gravity, it ALWAYS tipped over when they put the brontosaurus ribs on the drive-in window tray.
Misunderstanding a wiring diagram, wiring an aftermarket ECU backwards, flooding/locking the engine because injectors were stuck open, then trying to clear the engine with just a towel over the spark plug holes and turning it over.
Something sparked immediately and 8 foot tall flames were suddenly coming out of the engine bay because the fiberglass under the hood soaked a bunch of gas.
Got the garden hose and put out the fire, filling the engine with water. Somehow I drove it home the next day with minimal repairs.
Amazing. This beats my “there are eight holes, six pins, this is a 4 month repair” of the Z4 headlights.
I went to change a headlight when I was doing the tie rods*, and every bit of insulation fell off. I even tried to cheapskate my way out of it with electrical tape, but the more I flexed the wire to tape it, the deeper into the assembly the insulation broke off.
I took copious photos, but only of one side (are they mirrored across the center? identical? rotated?). There are deranged scribblings of 8-pin connectors all over the shed, each one more convinced I’d been able to do it right than the last.
The actual lesson to learn was something I already knew: test it first. The things are horrible to take apart – I had to drill holes to get to plastic release clips. Putting them back together should have been the last step. Instead, with my pictures and too much confidence, I was certain I’d put them back together correctly once, twice, three times.
Eventually I got so frustrated I left it for 2 or 3 months (I was also generally busy anyway), and when I put it on the ground, the engine had an extremely rough idle and would stall, an entirely new issue from when I’d raised it up back in Jul…. August.
*Fun fact: the first step for changing the headlights in an E85 is “Raise the car and remove the front wheels”
I have a few, but I can share one that is also Ford Festiva related! In 1993 my Squareback was starting to have chronic spark plug launching issues, and I needed a reliable daily driver while I was in college. I bought a 1988 Festiva with 60k miles on it. Drove it for years, dead on reliable, cheap to run. Unstoppable in mud and snow. Sadly, I rear ended someone in 1999.
Via the Festiva email list, someone in Washington DC was selling a 1988 Festiva for $1000 with 70k miles on it. That was a good price at the time for one of these cars, that was supposedly in good shape. This was before the prevalence of simple digital photography, no pictures.
My friend and I drove from Atlanta to DC in his Miata, only to have the timing belt snap in the Carolinas somewhere. AAA towed us to a nearby shop and after some hours we were back on the road. We get to DC only to find our clothes were soaked in coolant that had tipped over in the trunk.
We get to this guy’s squat who is selling the car, the house barely looks habitable. The car is… not a mess, but it’s not in good shape. The paint is shot, and the guy was a smoker with a messy dog. Plus the car had a weird chemical smell which I eventually discovered was a bad gas tank vent system. I did buy the car though, I had no choice at that point. My friends called it The Chemical Car because of the persistent smells.
I fixed most of what was wrong with it, but the transmission was becoming increasingly problematic with shifting difficulties. Getting parts for these cars was also problematic in 1999-2000. I had resorted to buying shift linkage parts from Kia dealerships in the UK.
I drove it for a year. I realized I was no longer in college, I had a good job, and I was an adult, and could afford a used VW Golf. I got $800 in trade and drove the subsequent Golf for 12 years.
Ultimately two different Ford Festivas were both the best and worst cars I’ve ever owned.
Great tale, and makes me nostalgic for Ford’s competent subcompacts (I mean, every one BUT the Aspire).
Back in 2017 I Decided it would be a terrific idea to sell my business, build a house, and go do something else. Ended up landing a job at a local Steel mill. Pay wasnt the best but the mental load was gone, so life was a lot happier overall. Still, some sacrifices had to be made to make the move and finish the house:
My fleet before the career change:
07 Wrangler 4 door, 35’s, full exocage, completely built
95 F-250, Regular cab Longbed 4×4 with a 460 engine and nary a speck of rust.
2006 Jeep Commander Limited, also lifted and mildly built
2013 Dart (hush, it was a work car and I actually quite liked it.)
2015 Chrysler 200 (wife’s car, and a lease)
After selling the shop, building the house, and the 50,000 a year pay cut, I sold what I had to sell, my brother totaled the 200, and We had to have 2 cars to get us to work and be able to afford them.
I ended up with a $1500, 170,000 mile Nissan Cube, and the wife found herself in a 16 Traverse.
The Traverse was the single most unreliable vehicle I have ever owned.
The cube? Honestly I liked it! I put funny stickers on it, painted the hood and fender primer and made it look like a rat rod.
But it was SOUL CRUSHING to be without a pickup truck or a Jeep. It was a low spot in life for sure, but at the end of the day, they’re just things. You gotta find happiness in whatever position you’re in, at the end of the say.
From the time my first born was born until just a couple years ago, so a period of like 5-7 years, my CTS-V sat in my garage and racked up less than 100 miles per year. Like I drove it into the nearby city for a single car show each summer and down to get an inspection every year. That’s it. I nearly sold the thing just because it sat so much and it made me sad. But every time I turned the key and listened to that B&B header/x-pipe burble I just couldn’t list it. It’s probably worth twice now what it was worth in those days, and now I drive it to more than one car show/cruise and even remember to run an errand with it every once in a while. It’s such a hoot, you can’t drive it even once without putting it sideways through an intersection or around a turn. It’s just so silly. Both my young ones love the speed and noise now too.
97 Buick LeSabre around year 2000. I bought it in 1999 really cheap with a ton of hail damage and about 90,000 miles on it. It was a salesman’s company car from my dad’s work. It was fine… actually really nice for more than a year. Then it started just shutting off randomly. Sometimes at a stoplight, sometimes on the interstate at 70mph. No common denominator. Sometimes it would not do this for a week or two, and sometimes it was frequent. Sometimes the car wouldn’t restart for 20 minutes. My mechanic couldn’t ever repeat the problem. It threw no codes. It just wasn’t dependable so I traded it in on a 2000 Olds Alero (on a rainy night) and they gave me the same price I had paid for it. I’m sure they didn’t notice all the hail dents, since it was wet and I didn’t tell them about the stalling issues. Karma probably got me with that Alero, because it was nearly a lemon, but didn’t meet the legal definition. It was in the shop 22 days in the first year I owned it, including for a dead alternator the week I bought it.
My story will pale in comparison to many on here.
I had a 6 month stretch where I only drove my Escape on roads with lots of side streets or open shoulders so I could quickly pull over when it went into limp mode. It ran fine if I could turn it off and restart it, but it would randomly lose power at least once every time I drove it. I kept trying to fix it during this whole ordeal, but nothing worked for long. We took the chance to dump the car when we bought a new car for my wife.
My low point was running my Accord into a curb. My aunt very gracious lent me a Oldsmobile Alero to drive while I fixed the Accord, but driving around every day for a week or two in that horrible early 2000s GM interior really made me appreciate my Accord. The Ghost of Alero Future scared me into never mistreating my Accord again.
So, in 1985, my Uncle-In-Law, a Florida real-estate lawyer, went and bought an El Camino. This El Camino.
https://i.imgur.com/lIidjYn.jpg
He kept this car for almost the rest of his life. This is somewhat amazing as he bought more cars than anyone I’ve ever met. Usually two a year, although some years he’d buy three or four. Well, fast forward to about a year or two before I graduated high school and went into the USAF; he had some idiot redneck pull the TBI from the 4.3L and slap on an Edelbrock intake, carb, and dual exhaust. It also had an HEI ignition on it, but I’m not sure if that was a factory setup or if it was something the redneck did, but whatever it was it had to be rigged up and had a crappy power wire running to it. More on that later.
It was done… poorly. The choke was held half-shut at all times by a zip tie. It idled at something like 1500+ RPMs (not sure what, as it didn’t have a tach.) The exhaust leaked, it was badly put together in general. But he also had it repainted at that time and bought those bullet hole wheels, and to be fair it looked great.
About the time I joined the USAF, my Mom bought the car from my uncle-in-law (who she worked for as a paralegal.) Susie’s rear end was pretty much shot, and I hadn’t been able to re-install the 8″ I pulled from a ’68 Mustang, so Mom gave me the El Camino to drive. For about a year it was fine. At that point in time:
A lot of the issues here are related to this being my second car that I really had issues with and was wrenching on on my own. However, the first five items? They happened within a year. Then I had the El Camino after getting out of the Air Force for about 14-16 months before getting my truck back, so those last issues cropped up in that short of a time.
This stupid berkeleying car let me down at every single turn, whenever it could. It never had a single issue with my uncle as the owner. Its giving its current owner, my mom’s husband, fits as well. Maybe it was just mourning that my uncle sold it. Maybe my mom’s husband is a horrible mechanic. Maybe the shop that did the swap for mom’s husband was a bunch of idiots. No clue.
Mom let me know the other weekend that she’s taking it to a shop in July in order to get it fixed, then she’s going to give it to me.
There was a period of time where I awesomely owned an NC Miata as my summer daily/autocross/track car and a beat up Mk1 MR2 as my winter beater. Turns out the MR2 was pretty awesome too, so I started auto crossing that, too. Well, one fateful fall the Miata became crashed and the MR2 blew a head gasket and I had nothing to drive.
So I bought my buddy’s beat up Yaris to get me by until I could get something else. Believe it or not, the Yaris was a former race car that had been restored to street duty after it had been rolled over. There was virtually no interior, no headliner, the roof leaked when it rained, the battery died if it sat longer than 9 hours without moving, and it still had a header and straight pipe, so it was neighbor-offendingly loud. But it ran well and did it’s job for a few months. I got $500 on trade in, which would have been a win except I paid a lot more than that.
I will say that there is definitely a certain sense of freedom in driving something you don’t give two shits about. I did maneuvers in that thing that would curl your hair.
1981 Buick Skylark, bad enough as a malaise era car in itself, but particularly after I wrecked it twice and was too poor to get the bodywork done. Oddly enough, I still hated my later supposedly nicer and more reliable ’94 Altima even more. Fortunately, those are the two most embarrassing.
98 SVT contour. Zero rust, 114k, minty. From the original owner, all paperwork, gas logs, the works. Guy ghosted me the moment he got my money. Car had broken both front springs, and rears were collapsed. Rear swaybar links were toast. Rear brakes were rusted and non functional. He knew. Come to find out, early 98 contours used a unique ABS block that when it goes bad, stops the rear brakes from working. I was in college, and could afford to fix it. Ended up having to drive my mustang (slammed and on nitto drag tires) in a western NY winter. Sold the contour for a thousand loss.
You ask this question like I have already reached it…
Honestly nothing too bad. One time I put old gas in my windshield washer reservoir because a mechanic friend put it in a windshield washer fluid bottle without removing the label or otherwise labeling it and it was the only open bottle (I had his permission to use it). Luckily I didn’t run the washer before I realized and I had a little bit of washer fluid already in the reservoir. The lid shrunk for the reservoir temporarily but it was otherwise fine.
Yours is kinda like mine, though all my own foolishness – why on earth did I think it was okay to transport a poorly-covered container of coolant on the floor in the backseat of my Mustang??
I spent untold hours trying to get it all out, and the carpet, a decade later, still has that distinct smell if you get really close.
That seems a lot worse than my story. I’m sorry you went through that
“The washer fluid is NOT fine!”
A Renault Alliance. Don’t think I need to say anything else.