What Was Your Lowest Point In Car Ownership? Autopian Asks

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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.

Aa Merc 2

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.

Swimmer Merc

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?

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83 thoughts on “What Was Your Lowest Point In Car Ownership? Autopian Asks

  1. i said on twitter it was too soon still and it kinda is but fuck it, guess i have to say it eventually
    aged 18, in college (uk), driving a crappy £1000 vw polo with a leaky roof, terrible decat by a previous owner and all of 60hp. i tried to make it vaguely “cool” but realised quickly i didnt like it enough to spend the money to do the mods it’d need for me to actually be happy owning it, especially after i shelled out 400 quid to pass mot due to the previously mentioned decat and the throttle had started sticking
    so i decide to use some inherited money and treat myself to an actual *nice* car. i find a 2009 fiat panda 100hp, exactly what im looking for. good condition, low-ish miles. i buy it for £2500 off a lovely bloke in the middle of a heatwave and it’s just perfect. the first carpark i stop at to buy a drink heading home a random guy says “that’s a cool looking car. must be fun to drive”. we chat and i feel like a million dollars. i drive home and stop off everywhere just to look at it. it was so much fun to drive.
    fast forward 9 days, im taking my girlfriend to mcdonalds, i dont pay enough attention and run into the back of a car at a roundabout. im fucking heartbroken. the worst day of my life. my new baby, destroyed.
    you’d think that was the bad part? yeah. not even close sadly. blinded by guilt, disappointment and optimism i decide not to go through the insurance i already pay thousands for (idiot) and repair it myself. i find a guy who promises he can make it like new and i start gathering parts. i spend about 1k to gather all the new and used shit i need – the one silver lining of this was the good friends i made who hooked me up with the stuff i needed. i drop them off at his shop and he assures me it’ll be done ASAP.
    fast forward 2 months, ive got a few occasional updates that sound like a lot of work has been done but with not much evidence. i have a holiday booked, and he tells me it wont be ready before then. it has to be, i tell him. he says fine, you can pick it up unpainted then. he presents me with a £6000+ bill. when i tell him im not paying that he threatens me with legal action. everyone ive talked to says it was 2 days work maximum. i have a breakdown and just pay it. yeah, stupid, i know – i was all kinds of fucked up.
    i take it on holiday, sans air con, radiator fan, working foglights and a few other things he said worked fine. the car drives fine enough but to this day ive never been able to shift the association. it keeps me up 2 or 3 nights every week, almost 2 years later. i truly hope he rots in hell for taking advantage of a distraught kid who was stuck in a shit situation. i never even got a proper record of what was done. it’s still to this day left such a sour taste in my mouth regarding that car and anything car related.
    not really sure where to end this. i still have the car, but will be selling it within a few weeks and taking whatever loss i end up with because i just cant stomach it anymore. i need to try and move on.
    hopefully my volvo does me better

  2. A few years ago the heater system on my GMC Safari pulled a Torchinsky. The valve sending coolant to the heater core exploded while I was driving on a cold fall day and started spilling its guts onto the road. I was pulling into the parking lot at work, so I parked, decided I didn’t want to deal with it, and went inside. At the end of the day, I couldn’t find any obvious source of leakage, so I figured I could make it home by blasting the cabin heater to dump excess heat, park at home, and drive my second car while I sorted it out. It took me about three times as long as usual to make it home, accounting for cooldown stops, but I eventually made it.

    I had already been passively searching for a new van anyways, so the repair slid further and further down my priorities list. And then I found the GMC’s replacement, a Ford Transit. Ford was offering a nice manufacturer rebate for trade-in on competing vans, which was more than I would make by selling my GMC.

    So I patched up the heater plumbing enough to drive the GMC to the dealership, but that’s as far as my repair went. I’m pretty sure the head gasket was exploded also, but I could make the drive to the dealership with a few cooldown stops.

    With a few blocks to go, the temperature gauge was redlining. But I only had to go a few more blocks and I could not be bothered any more.

    So I rolled into the dealer parking lot with a smoking van, all the dashboard lights blinking, and the interior not cleaned a smidge. And then I told the saleswoman I wanted to trade it in on a brand-new Transit. The dealer gave me a token $100 trade-in value, but the manufacturer rebate brought that total value up 15x.

    Not sure I’ve ever been so shameless as I was at that moment, but I am kind of proud of it at the same time.

  3. 2000, my last year, caption of FSAE team, designed a good chunk of the car, competition, endurance race, turn 1, front brake bleeder not tight. Day over.

  4. Mercedes, that has got to be the coolest looking Festiva around. Who knew they could be rally cars. Fetivas are tough little cars. They started a massive road construction project near me and one of the workers showed up in a blue Festiva one day. This was in 2023! I did a triple take! Is your Festiva still registration eligible? My low spot in car ownership was the first car I bought for myself with my summer job while in school earnings. A lovely Butterscotch gold 1972 Ford Pinto Runabout complete with a knee killing under dash monkey ward add on AC unit. Rusted out everywhere on the lower body panels. I became a pro at applying bondo. It got a lower rattle canned tu-tone paint treatment to hide the bondo. Weren’t too many places a magnet would stick to that poor little foul after I fixed all of the holes on it. Good times. My 2nd car I bought was a 76 Honda Civic, it got the bondo/rattled can tu-tone paint treatment, too! Cars rusted so badly back then

  5. Ownership is tough, because technically my parents owned that wretched Altima. Bad car, don’t recommend, never again.

    Injuring my arm with the 411’s death wobble over a ~4,000-mile Lemons Rally road trip might be up there. My whole shoulder was toast after that. It’s still in garbage shape.

  6. I’ve had a few of those times where I was sort of skimming the bottom, but here’s one of my favorites – the time I sold my driver for beer-money.

    College. I had a complete beater-with-a-heater rusted-out ’78 Buick Skyhawk with a slippery transmission and partially non-existent rear brake line that also tried to choke it’s occupants with smoke coming in through the cabin when it sat at a stoplight. Used all the fluids all the time. I had paid $275 for it in an effort to “save” my good car at that time, an ’81 Mercury Cougar which I had left parked back at my parents’ place. The rusty Buick got me through my entire Freshman year somehow, including a couple of 2+ hour road trips, but the year was coming to a close, I knew the car wasn’t long for the world, and there was one big party left. Being flat broke, I figured I could rustle up some beer money by selling the Buick to the local junkyard.

    The junkyard I went to wouldn’t give me a dime more than $50. So, I figured I’d try the metal recycling/scrap yard next door. The guy there made the same offer, and I pointed out that was what the junkyard next door had said, and could he do better? He had to have “his guy” look it over. That guy, who was dressed in a black shirt that used these huge gold-looking medallions for buttons, took it out on a test drive. I explained to him that the brakes were really weak and I had to gently nursed the car across town to get there, downshifting at every light.

    Okay, sure, no-problem. Of course he takes off tearing down the access road until I can’t hear the car anymore. Then I hear it approach, ominously. As the beater Buick barrels around the corner, I swear I could see the moment he hit the brake pedal and nothing happened – his face did the slow-mo Ohhhhh Shiiiit morph thing in a split-second. To medallion-man’s credit, he managed to avoid anything important and drove the car straight into/up a pile of stacked junk next to a metal fence where it sat resting at an angle roughly six to eight feet off of the ground, still trying to bump it’s way further up the pile of pallets and other assorted detritus. Apparently, the impact tore the transmission linkage out and it wouldn’t go back into park. After doubloon-dude figured that out, he shut down the Skyhawk, swung open the door, and kind of fell/rolled out into the pile of junk before stumbling into the ground.

    He walked over and told the owner/operator with a completely straight face: “Well, the brakes don’t work, and something’s messed up with the transmission. It was slipping and now it won’t go into park.”

    By this time the two friends who had followed me down there were laughing rather heartily at this whole situation. I was trying not to, but it was something completely hilarious to behold. Finally, the owner/operator turned to me with this shit-eating grin and said “You know what, I can do $60” before pulling a surprisingly large wad of cash out of his pocket and peeling three 20’s off of it.

    I started laughing and said “Good ’nuff”. It ended up being a great weekend!

  7. For a couple of years my ‘collection’ consisted of a 58 VW Bus, 63 Plymouth Valiant, 64 Olds Cutlass, 70 Olds 442, 70 Dodge Challenger, 72 240Z, 73 Plymouth Fury III, 73 Yamaha XS650, 74 Suzuki GT750 and 86 Honda CR500. The Fury was the only one that would start, run with some degree of reliable regularity or could be driven in a Saskatchewan winter. My stepson has me beat with a 15 and growing collection of JDM and German cars, some of which actually run.

  8. As some of you already know because I won’t and will never shut up about it, my first car was a 1966 Ford Thunderbird, the absolute dream car of 16 year-old me with a learner’s permit and a head full of dreams.

    Said car was an absolute mess, but it was a beautiful mess with soul for days. “I can fix her,” I told myself. And I did! Kinda, sometimes…

    Sophomore year of high school, car is running rough. No amount of fiddling with the carburetor will make it run right, and what’s more, the car has a habit of stalling in right turns for some reason. By Senior year, the car’s stalling and rough-running problem is so bad that I pulled it into auto shop class for what would become an extended stay. Turns out the car was running on 7 cylinders and had low compression in all of them. Well, that explained the 5 mpg, ten minute warmups every morning before it would move, and lack of power… but the stalling was still a mystery.

    The more things my teacher and I pulled off the engine, the more problems we uncovered, and the project snowballed into a full engine rebuild which lasted several months and required us to get special permission to work on the car during COVID lockdowns so that I could get it out of the shop without calling a tow truck.

    The day it finally started again, it made it about 100 ft before stalling and refusing to start again… it had run out of gas. And my teacher was officially done with the car and would not help anymore… and it still stalled every time it turned right… but, progress nonetheless!

    I did relent and take it to a mechanic, who determined the cause of the stalling issue was a worn-out spring in the starter solenoid, an obscure problem unique to classic Fords. At this point the engine was actually running pretty great! It was tuned properly, starting quickly, making plenty of power and even getting much better gas mileage… just in time for the electrical system to go haywire.

    Up to this point, every low point with the car coincided with a high. I didn’t know I had it in me to rebuild an old V8 and have the thing actually work with notable improvements by the end. But the electrical system first targeted the power windows, a low blow in a car with no A/C which I commuted in during the summer. Then my turn signals stopped working entirely, which was the last straw.

    This was the issue that rendered the car officially out of commission for a whole year. I foolishly thought I could tackle the wiring issues myself, which resulted in too many hours in the hot sun fighting the puzzle-like assembly of the interior and digging through forum posts hoping for answers that never came.

    After a year of the car being a hopeless driveway ornament, I finally called it quits and… took it to a shop to have it fixed. What, you didn’t think I’d get rid of it did you? Well the shop spent several months on it before admitting they basically had no time to mess with an antique when they had customers with easy-to-fix newer cars who needed them back in action ASAP. So I took the car back with just the headlights and turn signals fixed, accepting that I would have to fix the radio and power windows myself somehow.

    As of last year, the interior was still a half-assembled mess, the windows still didn’t work, and the radio was a pipe dream. In fact, it actually worked less due to me discovering much of the wiring that did work was a horribly unsafe bodge job from foolish previous owner shenanigans. But I still drove it everywhere, because it was MY CAR darn it, and if I was going somewhere, I was taking the ‘bird! And my optimism for the car was truly at a high here. Yes it was a challenge, but I had time, I had dreams, I was sure that one day it would be beautifully restored and refined to my liking.

    And then one fateful day, a truck slammed on its brakes. I had enough time to stop. The lady behind me who was looking at decorations on a building across the street and didn’t realize traffic had come to a halt did not. Both cars were totaled, and the truck carried on, blissfully unaware of the carnage its hasty ceasing of motion had caused.

    In stereotypical old-car fashion, my ’66 T-bird made it home under its own power that day, with no mechanical damage, all the lights still working, and even tracking perfectly straight with no unusual handling… but the body was mangled enough that its future was in doubt. Insurance dealings dragged on painfully for months, during which I had no car and the awful knowledge that I had not accounted for all the money invested in repairs when setting an agreed-upon value for my insurance, so if the other person’s insurance didn’t value the car for enough… I was screwed.

    I spent months fearing that not only was my beloved first car doomed and I wouldn’t be able to get it back, but that I wouldn’t get enough money back from insurance to replace it with an equivalent car, or even something reliable enough to serve as a daily driver.

    Fortunately, the pattern continues. That was I think the lowest point in my car-owning experience, but it was followed by a high of learning that the insurance company valued it at an unfathomable 10 grand more than I though they would. I somehow got more out of that car than I had even put into it… and I had the option to keep it, so I did.

    As of 2024, my T-bird is out of commission for the foreseeable future, but I’m no longer stressed about it, because the payout easily covered another dream car of mine – a lovely little red 1990 Mazda Miata! All I had to replace on it was the roof, and now it’s practically perfect, slight bugginess with the popup headlights notwithstanding.

    The T-bird will live to see the road another day. I’m not at all convinced it’s unfixable, and I’m not giving up on it. As soon as I have enough money saved for a full restoration, it will get a new rebuilt salvage title and be my summer car again 🙂

  9. Daily drove my dad’s 1987 Volvo 240 on and off in high school. He bought it in 2017, got it home, and immediately discovered the floors were gone. For a while the overdrive relay would stick on and you’d have to repeatedly smack the dashboard to get it to turn off. One day I noticed the tail pipe was hanging low and about an hour later it fell off while I was on the interstate. Ripped it off and drove home with the remainder clattering like pots and pans in an earthquake the whole way back. At one point it was our family’s only functional car. I loved it though, I still miss its incredible turning radius, and folks at my school got a kick out of that old pile. Amazingly it never stranded me, which is not a claim my 3 year old Kia can make.

  10. When I was in college, my Geo Spectrum started to leak coolant. I was afraid it needed a new radiator and I was too broke to go to a mechanic. I was even too broke to buy coolant! So for months I drove the thing just refilling the coolant reservoir with plain tap water a couple of times a week.

    Finally I saved some money to take it to a mechanic… and it turned it was just a leaky hose, the repair was almost nothing.

    The best part is that the Spectrum kept running for years, like nothing had ever happened.

  11. When I decided to dump the Saturn that was my first car (which had its own issues), I was mostly shopping for Maximas and mostly on Craigslist. I drove a couple nice pre-facelift 5th gens but dawdled on the decision and they sold. I was ready to pull the trigger on a <100k mi green ’97 before the owner changed his mind and decided to keep it. I quickly jumped on another ’97 but in black, with around 150k miles but mostly clean, but paid a bit much for the miles it had. It rewarded me by dumping the clutch master cylinder when I went to head to school the first morning I had it, while also trying to sell the Saturn, and some family stuff popping up right after. Those things all resolved, but the Maxima would go on to need something every couple months, this part or that sensor, like the O2 sensor that my dad and I could not dislodge (rusted in from its early days as an Ohio car perhaps) prompting replacement of that section of the exhaust system.

    It ran well otherwise despite the issues and even those weren’t the fault of the car as much as they were age, but it was more than I really had time/funds/patience for between work and school. After that it settled down a bit; the A/C never really worked very well so it was windows down in a black car in humid NC summer. For some reason on sunny, mild days, it had an intermittent no-start issue. A starter replacement did not help, but that I mostly got around by parking in the direction of a downward slope if I knew I had to go out when the weather was nice so I could bump-start it.

    But then it seemed like another wave was going to start. The radiator cracked and I replaced that, I found the water pump seemed to be leaking now too. Between that, needing tires soon, and miscellaneous suspension noises that were tricky to diagnose – and the A/C and no-start – the will to put time and energy into it sunk lower still, and all that was going to be more than it was actually worth at that point. I sold it for an ’01 Accord which as it turned out the A/C didn’t work great in that car either, but that was tougher to tell as I got it in the middle of winter.

    Not really all that bad compared to some other’s situations, and the Saturn was actually in worse shape just in more amusing ways, but certainly some lessons and character building were had.

  12. Mine was when my mid-seventies A-Body refresh GM ChevPontiOldsmoBuick ran out of gas while I was on a date, which I didn’t realize was the problem. I got so frustrated that I slammed the hood down with the air-cleaner off so I damaged the carb. I was so broke I couldn’t afford to fix it. It became one of those abandoned cars the city tows away. Only 80k miles on it, so it was not a happy or smart thing. I was bound to public transit for next nine months or so. Dates didn’t go very well for me at that stage of life.

  13. First, this assumes that I have already hit my automotive rock bottom which I’m not so certain I have.

    For me it would have to be the 2 floods I’ve experienced. Losing your cars at the same time that everybody in your surrounding area loses their cars and all of the rental lots and dealership lots also lose their cars means you get the humbling experience of asking friends and coworkers for a car to borrow. The last time it took us over a month to get the insurance to even look at our cars to declare them totaled and cutting us checks took several more weeks.

    These days when a storm is coming I park one of our cars on the 3rd level of the parking garage at work.

  14. My first car was a 20-year-old Mercury Tracer that I bought for $800. It had a super neat feature called a “fuel cutoff switch” that caused the engine to shut down when I went over a bump. I would have to get out of the car, pop the trunk, push a button in the trunk, then get back in and restart the car.

    I grew up in Michigan with all of its potholey glory so this scenario happened at least a couple of times a week. That stuff builds character!

    The same car also had about a micrometer of brake pad left when I bought it. Soon after, I was complaining to my dad about a “weird scraping noise” and difficulty stopping.

  15. The entire 7-year period of ownership of my ’97 Econoline-150 conversion van. Sure, I had some great trips and vacations with friends with it, and the interior was immaculate, but it was so mechanically temperamental and I’ll never understand why.

    Ate brakes for breakfast, and ball joints too.
    The “vapor can vent valve” (or whatever it’s called) that lets air flow into and out of the gas tank as it fills or is emptied got blocked (which meant the gas station pump auto-stops would go off randomly and make it impossible to know where the tank was without turning it on)…twice. And they have to drop the gas tank for that fix.
    The rear blower fuse holder melted.
    It lost power once after a long drive, then turned on minutes later, so I immediately drove it home. 3 hours of dealership labor later, they found it was intermittent because of some rusting connector on the alternator. (They apparently drove it around themselves until it died on them, towed it back to the shop, and figured it out.)
    The front seat belts needed to be retracted manually when getting out. I was quoted $250 apiece if I wanted new pretensioners. Skipped that.
    A crossbar on the roof rack came out while it had an (empty) storage container on it, necessitating $180 at a body shop to remove the roof rack and seal the holes.
    The fuel filler hose rotted out and left a nice puddle at a gas station.

    The final nail in its coffin was rattling in one of the catalytic converters…3 years after it had been replaced, with a new one with a 2-year warranty. The other was still from the factory. The converter would’ve been another $700 just for the part.

    The thing that made it so difficult to choose to sell it sooner was that it never had engine or transmission issues. The most expensive single repair was, ironically, just the day it had front pads, rotors, and upper and lower ball joints replaced all at once. Other than that, the next biggest was the serpentine belt snapping and taking a cooling line with it.

    I want another used conversion van someday in the short or medium term, but it still looks like I’ll only be choosing between E-series and Expresses, and I’m not happy about it.

  16. I had a nice 5 year old Focus ST but then I met a girl with a never maintained Nissan Rogue. I liked her and she needed something reliable to drive so I just let her drive my Focus. Ff a year or so and we’re married and she’s pregnant shortly thereafter. I was going to need something to drive to work while she stayed at home with the new baby so I bought a turd of a 1997 Cartier Town Car for $800 to drive my 30 mile commute in. It had broken window regulators so the windows would fall and shortly after purchase the AC compressor locked up. Soon after that she had my son and he had problems with his blood sugar and bilirubin. This resulted in a 20 day NICU stint that was an hour from my job. I would have stayed at the hospital with him but my job only gave me 2 days of paternity leave and 40 hours of pto a year. That hour drive in a beater town car with no AC in a Georgia summer to see my son in the NICU was the single lowest point of my automotive hobby. It worked out though in the end because I replaced the town car with a nice Grand Marquis and eventually a Cobalt LS XFE and got a government job that gave me plenty of time to spend with my family. My wife drove the Focus for a few months after our firstborn came home but it was eventually sold for an Escape S and then later a Buick Enclave when my daughter came along. We’re still married and still happy with number 3 on the way so I guess it wasn’t a bad idea to let her drive my Focus. And as much as it sucked the Town Car never left me stranded and I sold it for what I bought it for.

  17. Now is one them for me. In the snowiest midwest winter in forever, only 1 of our 5 cars is fully usable. The 68 f250 was grandpa’s, waiting on restoration somewhere down the road; it can only be run for minutes at a time because the carb is shot, along with the lights and charging system, and the fuel tank. It runs off a Jerry can under the hood and has no back window. The 05 equinox overheats with a suspected warped head, just put head gaskets in it last year, the undercarriage is also rotted badly. My 95 cherokee is my mail jeep that I trust to carry me 132 miles 6 days a week. It also has 395 thousand miles, and on a good day is held together with duct tape and prayer. The fan hub bearing blew apart, destroying the radiator, fan, shroud, and bracket it mounts in. Which has been discontinued for many years, is 2 year only rhd specific, and I can’t find one in a junkyard. We bought a 2012 sequoia to replace the wife’s very rough van. Bought it with a bad engine, put in a junkyard unit that lasted 2 weeks before it self-destructed from unseen damage from the accident it came from. Our only mostly functioning vehicle is our 07 town and country that suffers from bad rust, needing an alignment, and a pretty bad exhaust leak.

      1. Thank you! I’ve put bars head gasket sealer in the equinox and so far it’s held up for me to at least run my mail route. The warranty 5.7 for the sequoia should be here tomorrow, I hope that after this it lives up to the toyota reputation.

        1. I highly recommend Bars Leak 60g tablets. Same tech Gramps would throw in the old Model T—except, with today’s HOAT coolants, this goldenseal root lasts. GM put it in cars from the factory when they had intakes leaking coolant. I gave my sil 4 more years of driving the Subaru she bought from me, then blew the head gasket of with this stuff. I always carry it as it’s compact & light. Cheap, too: < $5 at Advance.

          They call it Radiator Stop Leak Tablets (HDC). I call it cheap peace of mind 🙂

  18. My experience was mild, in late March 2017 we were down from two running cars and one running motorcycle to zero operable vehicles. In February our Mazda5 (the nice car) was totaled and while sorting that out our Saturn SL2 ended 15 years of loyal service by grenading the transaxle. Plus my motorcycle wasn’t cranking and a bad idea in winter. Plus we were living in a rental that prohibited working on cars so replacing the transaxle was a non starter.
    Fortunately we could survive a week without a car and used money from insurance to lease a new Mazda CX-5 which is still in the fleet

  19. Mad props to you for driving the door-less Festiva in Chicago in the winter!

    Also, potential props to your SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem) field for not getting it impounded or declared un-roadworthy — I’ve heard that the Chicago area has gotten really picky about rusty and otherwise down-in-the-heels cars. (Compared to what I remember from the 80s when the cars held together with duct tape and baling wire were common sights…)

  20. My biggest low point I think would be my 1971 Triumph spitfire, after being laboriously reassembled and mechanically restored up to drivable decided to catch on fire several hours before I was supposed to pick up my date for senior prom. Although no major damage was done to the car it dashed my cool guy car prom plans and I had to drive my significantly less cool 1980 VW rabbit diesel. My mom has a framed picture from the next day when they dragged me out to take a photo with the car still in my tux from the night before, let’s just say I don’t look happy.

  21. Lows? I’ve had a lot of learning experiences.

    Walking 6 miles back from a pay phone up a lonely rural road to the Subaru I had torn the transmission out of on a very dark night, I had a bear sort of bark at me. I guess that wasn’t really a low: more of an adrenaline high. Already singing ‘Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad’, I upped volume & pace and kept on truckin’. Couldn’t see even to try grabbing a fallen branch.

    I always carry a light—and have at least one in every vehicle. And I don’t do stupid things at stupid AM out in rural nowhere anymore.

    I learned plenty more things, but other’s stories are better than mine 😉

  22. I’d have to say in 2002, when I had three cars and all of them had problems at the same time. I had to resort to the old “which one is fixable fastest?” solution.

    1990 Cadillac DeVille- starter problems.
    1997 Dodge Intrepid- corroded positive battery cable (the only thing to ever go wrong).
    1987 Audi 5000- a bunch of stuff.

    It was a struggle to keep two of the three running- my wife drove the Intrepid. Eventually I got it sorted out, but for a week or two things were pretty dicey.

  23. Last summer a HUGE tree limb falling on not one of, but both of the cars I owned (the only cars I owned). 30 seconds before I was about to get in to one and drive away.

    Both got totaled, but it took a very long time for insurance to total one of them, which was almost new.

    It was my tree, on my property, and I had the rest of that diseased ugly ass pile of shit tree gone within days.

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