Some car enthusiasts will keep a car for as long as it lives. I love that idea of using up a vehicle until it’s ready to go to the scrapyard in the sky. Do you want to help reduce consumption? Keep that old hooptie on the road! But some cars will seemingly hang on forever. These cars could have a Christmas tree of warning lights and rust holes large enough to fall through, but somehow, they just keep going even long after you’ve had enough. Which of your cars refused to die, even when you wished they would just die already?
I tend to buy cars that are past their prime, so this is not an issue I run into often. Most of the vehicles I purchase for the Gambler 500 are a bad day from the scrapyard as it is. Then, I rally those vehicles until something seriously expensive breaks.
In 2019, I bought a Ford Festiva and removed its doors and windows. I learned very quickly why that car was parked in a field for a couple of years. Its gas tank had holes you could see through, its brake lines looked like they came from the Titanic, and it took just a little bit of off-roading to reveal a massive rust hole next to a rear axle mounting point.
I decided to keep it until something major broke, which happened just over a month later when the mega crusty brake lines broke as I pulled into camp before a rally.
Most of my Gambler 500 builds go like that. I’d buy a $500 crapbox, take it on a few rallies, then the car would break in a manner that’s not worth repairing. The most surprising failure was probably a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 240D, which went from being a reliable car to a nightmare in a weekend. Over the course of two days, the clutch began failing, the differential blew up, the starter solenoid died, a throttle coupling failed, and just to add insult to injury, the sunroof got stuck open and the cable for the hood latch snapped. I took all of that as a bad omen and got rid of that car while the differential still sort of worked.
The car that refused to die was a 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan. Sheryl and I spent $1,200 on the van (the new $500 nowadays) and then took it on a Gambler 500. The van got stuck every three minutes or so, lost its rear bumper, broke its exhaust, and its gas gauge worked how it wanted to. Oh, and filling the fuel tank was a nightmare because of an issue that caused gas pumps to click every couple of seconds. That van was just generally a miserable experience. But I told myself I would keep driving it because it still ran and drove fine.
Then the van’s power steering line blew, spraying fluid at hot parts, igniting a fire that melted parts in the engine bay and burned up a wiring harness. I wished for that van to burn to the ground. Instead, the burn was partial, leaving me with a half-dead van to tow home from 3 hours away. The van still ran and drive, but, understandably, Sheryl didn’t feel safe in a vehicle that threatened to kill her. So, I had to rent a U-Haul truck and dolly to tow the piece of junk home. It was a 9-hour ordeal to save a car I didn’t even want anymore. I ended up selling the van to a pair of dirt racers.
What stories do you have? Which cars refused to die, even when you perhaps wanted them to?
1989 Ford Escort. We abused that thing in every way possible and couldn’t kill it. Dukes of Hazzard style jumps, Ebrake slides and spins at highway speeds. Bumper cars on the highway. Off roading, mud bogging, drove through several rivers. Wide open throttle clutch dumps to big burnouts, did rockfords all the time For extra power just cranked the distributor as far as it would go. The muffler fell off eventually. That was about it. It would not die. Traded it in on an Integra.
Brilliant article idea. There are so many epic stories of our love/hate relationships with our rides here.
glad I don’t have to pick COTD!
I once owned an AMC Concord that kept eating torque converters and ball joints, suffered several years with a low compression cylinder, and eventually rusted through the floorboards, but to this day, ti was the only vehicle to never leave me stranded. . Even after the AMC suffered an electrical fire under the hood during its fifteenth year with our family which sent black smoke billowing through the vents and hood, I was able to bring it to a stop and the darned thing amazingly started right up like nothing was wrong except for a busted radio a few minutes later. Not willing to take any more chances, I turned that sucker in for a year-old 1995 Nissan the next day.
1988 Buick Regal Limited, burgundy on burgundy, bench seat. 3.1. I was about 14, my Mom’s Bonneville had issues, so my Dad gave my uncle $5000 to get something at a (dealer only) auction. We could look, so we picked out a few vehicles we would like. He ignored us completely and bought the damn Buick and gave my Dad $1500 back.. Purchased with 83,000 miles and a full tank of gas, sold with 83,000 miles and a full tank of gas. We put that damn thing up for sale SO many times, but then something would go wrong with another vehicle, or someone would hit a deer, etc. And we would take the For Sale sign off the Buick and get plates/PLPD on it again. Nobody in my family liked this car, but it just kept going as a backup. We finally sold it to my friend 5 YEARS later, who totalled it 2 weeks later.
I should mention, the Buick was dumped on us in 94, and finally sold to the guy who totalled it in early 2000
Winter beater that lasted through five yrs of University and beyond. It was a 73 2-dr Plymouth Fury 3, 360 2bbl bown on brown. Bought it for $100, it had over 100k miles when I got it and almost 300 when it finally went to the crusher bc no one would buy it for $75. It had mixed radials and bia ply tires when I got it. Spooky darty handling bc of that. Bought some used radials to mitigate. It went on many rockies ski and camping trips, Journied to all of the Western Canadian provinces and US States. Faithfully ferried friends to school and parties. Safely shuttled girlfriends around town aNd was lover for its commodius back seat. Suffered through a winter with a broken motor mount. Had an insurance claim Cor vetted burned down beside it ruining the paint, dash and cracked the windshield. It was the only car on the street which would reliably start at 55 below. It was hooned, driven at high speed through ditches and plowed fields, bashed, hit with hundreds of shinny hockey pucks, rugby, soccer and footballs. It had its floors awash with beer and fenders christened with frozen barf. It was the most indestructible pile I ever owned. It just refused to die.
Welp, dovetailing nicely with Jason’s steamy-clevelanding of General Mfer’s infamous Cinnamon Toast Caddy this morning, is my tale of an ’84 Chevy Cavalier purchased while I was in college for a single C-note at a police auction.
It was the source of instant disappointment as I could hear some kind of rod-knock coming out the engine as soon as it warmed up. Still made the 50-mile drive home without issue. Once it was back and I had a chance to clean all of the garbage out of it, I decided it really was too-much of a crap-can to fix up, so I commenced to move it around to different parking-lots as a backup to my other couple of hoopties.
I ended up doing this for almost two years. Having a pizza-delivery job during that time let me keep an eye out for apartment parking lots with extra spaces and/or no sticker requirement. I usually moved it once every couple of weeks and as I’d pop the hood, hook the alligator clip to the battery to get the fan running, and drive the rod-knocking pos to it’s next resting place, I kept thinking it would be nice if it would just die already. A call to the scrapyard would net me around half of the purchase price and I wouldn’t have to think about it any more.
Kinda glad that didn’t happen. During this time I moved out of the dorms and purchased a trailer in a nearby town. Life was good, and then the clutch slave-cylinder went out of my ’84 Celica and the fuel pump went out of my ’83 Cordoba a day apart from each other. What to do – I had started a new job in the tech industry and had zero time for wrenching… oh yeah, that shitbox Cavalier!
Called a buddy, picked up the Cavalier, and ended up driving it most of the summer. Finally sold it when the park management figured out I was doing a three-car shuffle with a strict two-car limit. I actually had the wife’s tacit permission, but when the husband found out I ended up with the cops at my door.
So, away the car went to a friend of mine in need of transportation. Got my $100 back. She drove it for about a month and blew it up (her words) on the way to get plates since she didn’t follow my “check and fill the antifreeze once a week” advice.
I helped her get it off of the highway. Cooled down it simply started back up again, rod-knock now louder than ever. Drove it to her place, checked the oil. Milkshake. Drove it to the junkyard and collected $50. She put the proceeds towards a $300 Volvo.
1981 Bullnose Ford F150.
Regular cab, 4 speed manual, longbed, 4×4, and that gorgeous brown over tan (over rust) paint.
The old girl had a 300,000 plus mile straight six under the hood, and 21 year old me COULD NOT WAIT to swap in a very spunky 351.
So the plan was to just have a ball running that 300 until it exploded in a hilarious fashion. That truck became a vehiclular Steve-O, just a vessel for all of my most hilarious hillbilly ideas. We redlined it until the header glowed red to cook a steak on a cast iron, we drove it around at redline, I burned a set of tires until they exploded. Once we managed to get the engine block to read a rediculous temperature, i cant remember what it was but i want to say the side of the block was 560 something degrees. The oil on the side of the block was boiling.
This went on for months and that 6 would NOT DIE. At one point the truck finally locked up on me, overheated to the point of puking oil and antifreeze out of the block.
The next day, it started up.
Amongst all the antics, unfortunately I managed to bend the frame, and it never got the V8 I wanted so badly. On the day it went to be with Jesus, I drove it across the scales.
It burned into my soul that a straight 6 is better than any V8.
My first car was a 1998 Pontiac Bonneville SLE, which was how I fell in love with GM H-bodies and the Series II 3800, and how I fell in hate with GM’s mid-90s/turn of the millennium badge engineering and plastic everything. That car had almost 200,000 miles on it when I got it, but still got me through college and law school. The odometer stopped at 299999, but it kept going. I rearended someone and sideswiped a concrete pillar in the law school garage (I was a bad driver in those days lol), and fixed the damage myself, and it kept going. The key got stuck in the ignition when the ignition cylinder failed, and I couldn’t afford to fix it, so I just left the key permanently in the ignition and used it as an on/off switch, and it kept going. The floor shifter button broke so I popped off the center console cover and shifted gears by pulling the shift linkage, and it kept going. Shortly after the headliner fell in and the check engine light (on because half of the dual exhaust had fallen off in a snowbank) burned out, the car was stolen. The thieves brought it back an hour later. I’m not even joking. That car trucked on until my girlfriend at the time wouldn’t let me drive it to work anymore, so I sold it to someone who wanted the tires. He paid me for the tires.
The Sacrificial 04 Sentra. It was ever in a state of dying, but never in a state of dead until I started pulling it apart to learn. It was a Spec-V, and a hoot for many of those 170k miles (that I drove, I assume the 81k before that also included one or more hoots), but it stranded me more than once.
The damn thing would still turn over before I finally started plucking pieces off it. There was something deeply wrong though – it had essentially stopped responding to the accelerator. I wish I could revisit it knowing what I know now, but literally 45 minutes ago I got teased by friends who were looking at my address on google maps and lo, there sits the Sentra, shrine of my shame, before it was hauled away last year.
I had an ’87 Oldsmobile Calais in the late-90s that was my winter beater. It had a 5-speed manual with the Iron Duke “Tech4” 4cyl engine with over 200k miles. It was dented up and rusty, and I bought it from my then-girlfriend’s dad with a busted radiator for $500. After dropping in a new rad, that thing ran great for many years afterward. I beat on it as a high school kid, delivered pizzas in it, and it got sold to among my friends a few times and never skipped a beat.
Rust and hooning finally killed it. My friend who bought it a year or two after I owned it took it off-roading and the rear shocks punched their way into the trunk. Seems like a proper way to go.
After my high school car died a coworker sold me their (13yo at the time) 1981 Datsun 200SX for $500. This is far and away the best $500 I’ve ever spent, even adjusted for inflation because few things on this planet are more fun than a $500 car. Anyways, it started with a screwdriver and the stereo was a boombox in the back seat and the HVAC was imaginary and you had to disconnect the battery if you left it parked for more than 24hrs or it’d drain itself but that car was dead on reliable.
Now by “reliable” I don’t mean that it wouldn’t give you issues, because it absolutely would, but it never left me stranded. It refused to start one day but would happily turn over as long as you cranked the key and since I was only a couple miles from home I drove it home on the starter motor making it one of the earliest hybrid vehicles beating the Prius by at least a decade.
I’ve shared the story here before about the time the brakes fell off and I strapped them back on with a wire coathanger to get home and also the time the tie-rod separated making the drive more interesting to say the least but again, I got home.
In fact the incident that finally killed it, it still got me home. It was a foggy foggy night in late October and we got the brilliant idea to go, um, relocate the plywood Halloween decorations from our old HS shop teacher’s front yard. Now, we had visited his yard several times before to, um, relocate things and we knew the way but remember it was crazy foggy this night. In fact, the first house we pulled up to my friend jumped out of the passenger seat and disappeared into the mist. I couldn’t see him but I heard him start cussing and asking me to guide him back to the car. After a few seconds of “Marco/Polo” he jumps back in and says we’re at the wrong house! We slowly creep one more block down to the right house and he jumps out again disappearing into the mist. I still can’t see him but this time I can hear a loud rattling sound, him cussing again, and some murky lights come on. He manages to get back to the car and informs us that the decorations were all chained to the porch and <Shop teacher name redacted to protect the innocent/> turned on the lights!
So we beat a hasty getaway at about 3-5mph because I couldn’t see a damn thing out the windshield. Remember the non-functioning HVAC? No defrosters either but it didn’t matter because sticking my head out the window into the fog didn’t improve anything. Anyways, in short order we could see a reflective stop sign shining in the mist and deduced that we were finally at the end of the street where we needed to turn. Unfortunately this stop sign must have been back from the intersection by about 3-4′ because when I made the turn the driver’s front wheel fell off the road into the ditch and the underside of the car landed on the concrete culvert. We were able to power back out but the alignment was way off and I must have cracked the radiator because the fog was twice as thick now. Still, the Datsun drove me home.
I say this is the incident that finally killed the Datsun but not completely. It would still crank up and drive you around until it over-heated so it wasn’t dead, dead. But the cost of repairs was going to be way more than I paid for the car initially so it didn’t get fixed. No worries though, because another friend of mine bought a ’82 200SX a few months later and I sold the car to him $200 and he drove it to his house under its own power.
RIP Naco-Datsun, the car that was too stupid to know when to quit.
1982 Mustang LX. with the 88 HP 2.3L four-banger, manual windows, no AC and ass-searing vinyl seats. At least it had the 4MT, with overdrive even! Drove it for 4 years like the accelerator only had two positions – all the way on or all the way off. Pretty sure there was a dent in the firewall from trying to get it to show any life at all.
Of course it was impeccably maintained in the manner you’d expect a broke college kid with no wrenching skills to maintain it.
I had a girlfriend who drove an ’80s Subaru Legacy wagon….in the mid-2000s.
It was beat all to hell, some mismatched panels at that point, but damn it was indestructible.
But being the good autopian I strive to be, I kept working on her to ditch it and get something cooler that fit her style better than that. And it finally worked – she bought an NA Miata shortly thereafter.
But wow Subarus were built well back when.
(And yeah, I would pay higher taxes to subsidize women – hell, anyone – who want to buy convertibles – it just makes the world an all-around better place from my pov)
Heh, my ex bought a 2007 without any due diligence and by the end of its, like, 2-year run in her life, barely hanging on, the shop she took it too was running it on 10W-40 (IIRC) to slow the losses through the head gaskets (IIRC). Whatever the case it was pumping heavier oil because lighter stuff would just seep through and burn off, and the head gasket replacement was never on the table
My 72 Pinto. Used to drift that thing on 78’s all over town. I stopped checking the oil for a year cuz I was a total stoner. She lasted another year of offroading and drifting before I broadsided a tree while rallying:) Maybe it was my best car…
1970 or 71 Pinto abuser here. Flooded to the roof at least three times. Over 100K when it was gifted to me in 1981. Never had an oil change. Ever. It took me over a year to kill it dead.
And as a stoner, I did not give AF.
1995 Plymouth Voyager – the ones that came with only 1 sliding door, on the right hand side. Beat the crap out of it camping and skiing while driving every day in big city traffic. The bloody thing wouldn’t even rust. My sole happiness point: my first auto digital display over the rearview mirror. Put nearly 300K kms (~180K miles) on it before my wife gave me a break and let me donate it to the Cancer Society.
Gotta love a creeper van voyager,smooth ride ,good heat, take the rear seat out and haul all kinds of crap in it.
1988 Pontiac 6000 with the Iron Duke. I gave it to my sister then we have it to my friend then he sold it. It would not die.
My 2001 SL2. I stopped doing maintenance* hoping it would just die. It refused. I eventually bought a new car and donated it.
* I did put in oil. I didn’t change the oil. I would just add a quart as it burned off.
1979 Cutlass Calais. Absolutely gutless 260 ci v8. $75 for the car & another 75 for a transmission. I needed a car in the moment, and this sort of qualified. But, it tracked poorly, drank fuel, couldn’t handle worth a damn, and it creaked annoyingly.
2months later I had a suitable Subaru, so I set about tearing the transmission out. That took 4 months of occasional attention—then I sold it for the same $75.
—I didn’t remove the transmission: I tore it up kind of out
Wait, you don’t live in Chicago, do you? 😉
No: Mid-Atlantic
they made quite a few of those damned things. This was pretty straight and all there—just pointless for me. And that horrible plastic ‘wood’….shudders
1995 Chrysler Cirrus. My first car bought for $700. With the previous owner, it had survived 3 separate major deer strikes, including one where it went airborne into a nearby cornfield. Then it was parked in a barn for 3 years to be home to mouse colony. Despite constant electrical issues and yet another accident, the car never truly gave up on me – except the one time the distributor died when I was driving home one night. I got it with 135k miles on it and have no idea how many were on it when I finally got rid of it because the odometer display had stopped working. Ended up selling it to a deadbeat cousin who didn’t change the oil for years and decided tap water was an appropriate coolant, even in Midwest winters. They ultimately sold it and I continued to see it on the road from time to time for a few years after that.
In the end, that car survived 4 separate teen drivers and all their stupidity, 3 deer strikes, 3 years abandoned in a barn, at least 1 non-deer accident, 2 years of non-maintenance, and an alleged cracked engine block.
The deer or the car?
The car, though I imagine the deer didn’t fare much better.
I have a 4Runner that I’ve owned forever and love, but it’s a second car that we do not need, and we only have one parking space. My wife has a newer car and it’s rare for both of us to need a car at the same time – I work from home 99% of the time, and we live in a walkable neighborhood. I would never sell the 4Runner, but if it were stolen or totaled, part of me would feel a little bit free, and I could replace it with something fun to drive (or even better, just never think about street parking ever again).
Pick a price and sell the Runner. Put the money somewhere its safe, not under your mattress. Use the money to rent a replacement when you need it. If the money is gone in a month, my bad, shoulda kept the Runner. If half the money is there after a year, you’re welcome. If you do sell the runner, cancel the insurance.
1999 Blazer. I got it at 138k miles and changed the oil maybe every 10k miles. Traded it in at 175k miles and it was still running mostly fine. I liked it a lot despite having weird issues like camber that I had to adjust frequently so it wouldn’t eat through tires every 6 months or the intermittent CEL.
Friend of mine in high school (around 2010) had a 1985 Mercedes 300D. It had been his brother’s science fair project, converted to run on cooking oil. The car wasn’t in great shape when they got it, with large rust holes in trunk, tons of bondo, an odometer that broke around 250k, fuel gauge didn’t work, half the windows wouldn’t go down, no ac, central locking broken, off the top of my head. His folks said that if the Benz died, they’d help him buy a newer VW diesel to run on cooking oil. To specify this wasn’t his only car. Anyway, we took that as a challenge to try and kill the car.
Things we did included seeing how fast you had to crest a hill to get all four wheels off the ground (85, and a relatively smooth landing too), lots of donuts in fields, slamming into sandbags on the side of the road, dropping it from drive into low at 55mph numerous times (it made some spectacularly horrible sounds, but wouldn’t go into park at that speed when we tried). He showed up at my house once with bits of trim hanging off the front bumper, as he’d been ramming down snow banks in parking lots. That’s just the stuff I remember and that I was there for. In general, lots of hooning on what was already a worn out car. Hell, I don’t know if they ever changed the oil in it. It never died. The transmission would sometimes mix up first and second gear, but it would cruise smoothly on the highway (even with horribly bent wheels) at 80mph all day. They sold it for more than they paid for it, since it had the vegetable oil kit on it.
My 1998 Polo 1.0 finally died after more than two years of me being fully aware I was basically driving it to death. Nothing but basic maintenance in that period, funny, increasingly worrying noises be damned. I guess I even actively tried to kill it by not really holding back in terms of being rough on the engine and gearbox while driving. It no longer counts since it did die, but it took the damned 1L engine 2 years of aggression to finally give in.
My two 1988 Citroën BX diesel station wagons (first a blue one, 9 years later a red one) just kept on driving and driving to around 300K miles both of them, even though body panels, hinges, plastic stuff, wiring and electronics on then weren’t made to last as long.
Felt funny, that engine and suspension were perfect on them and everything else very worn out.
My neighbour’s BX looked pristine but spent more time at the shop fixing engine/suspension issues than on the road while he had it (which, unsusprisingly, wasn’t for long). Same story with my uncle’s series 1 CX Prestige, which looked striking and definitely cemented my love for Citroëns, but I swear, the most positive thing my uncle could say about that car was that at least it was comfortable, so driving it or waiting for roadside assistance while stranded basically felt the same,.
Must have been the diesels then.. my one petrol BX died suddenly one day and I had it towed away by the scrap guy (it was a series one so I really sholdn’t, but sometimes it’s just nice to be free of a burden)
My CX GTi never did anything wrong in two years, even on longer trips to Esbjerg, Berlin or Hamburg (from CPH)
I honestly don’t remember what model the BX was; the CX was a Prestige, I remember the badge in the rear. I think that means it was 2.4L petrol engine. No vinyl roof, sadly, but maybe one of the most striking shades of burgundy I ever saw in a car. My uncle had a few other cars at the same time and the CX was this love-hate thing for him: he clearly loved the comfort and the looks, but was way too used to old-school Mercedes reliability so he probably felt a lot of buyer’s remorse about it.
To me, the CX was one of the most amazing cars in the entire family, so much so that I rememeber every little detail about it vividly – I swear I can still remember the smell inside. We had some cool cars in my broader family: another uncle of mine had a Typ 14 Karmann-Ghia (that one still survives, my rich cousins bought everyone else’s shares in the car when my uncle died without leaving descendents, and have been restoring it for the last couple of years). He also had a Traction Avant, which also got restored recently by the current owners, and an Isetta, but that one was gone long before I was even born.
1994 Escort wagon. I bought it cheap because I just needed a car and ended up driving it for about a year with broken rear shock-mounts and a busted out rear window,I continuously hoped the fucking thing would die on,but nooo.