The worst lemon you have ever owned.

[Guest asinger]

When I was 17 in 1987 my grandfather (mother's side) gave my mother his car when he bought himself a new one. It was a 1976 Ford Granada, (no, it gets worse) with a white vinyl roof and powder blue body. My mother permanently lent the car to me and my sister so we could have a car to drive. I pretty much drove it full time.

I hated that car.

If the paint job wasn't bad enough, you had to reach through the steering wheel to change radio stations. Gas mileage was okay, IIRC, but I had it over a friend's house when the water pump died. It was about 10 degrees that day, and another friend came over and fixed it.

It eventually developed a head gasket leak, and I told my parents I'd like to get rid of it. They said, no, we'll pay to get it fixed. So they did, and I was driving it later to a friend's house when I heard this sudden and very loud CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK from undre the hood. Turned out it threw a rod. Shortly after, I drove it to the junkyard.

Runner up is the '85 Chevy Celebrity my FIL gave my wife after we got married. It was a true POS, engine light always on, got 10 miles to the gallon. Finally I paid to get that fixed, and it was one big repair after another. Sensors always going out, etc. Eventually we traded it for a Saturn and never looked back. Saturn ran great.

[Reatta Man]

WORST (but with a redeeming quality):

1974 Chevrolet Vega. Rough running engine, whiny transmission, crappy electronics. :mad: My ex-wife DEMANDED it in the divorce.

WORST with NO redeeming qualities:

1999 Oldsmobile Intrigue with the 3.5 'short star' engine. Replaced engine. Rebuilt the A/C. Crappy electronics. BEAUTIFUL car, so it sold in a heartbeat. Will probably run forever for the current owner!

[Guest THEHKP7M13]

...1999 Oldsmobile Intrigue with the 3.5 'short star' engine. Replaced engine. Rebuilt the A/C. Crappy electronics. BEAUTIFUL car, so it sold in a heartbeat. Will probably run forever for the current owner!

Hillarious!!!

I was looking at one a long time ago. Luckily a freind on mine told me how terrible the shortstar was and when I started pulling the TSBs I never gave the car a second thought.

[Guest THEHKP7M13]

FYI:

I still wouldn't touch any car in the AUDI/VW GROUP. They are horrible and the parts are far too expensive for being a peoples car!

[D Yaros]

Without a doubt, a 1954 Plymouth Belvedere!

[5219]

Regarding the question about rotten cars back in the day; my father bought a 1957 Dodge Custom Royal Lancer 4 door hardtop brand new from the dealer. It was coral and white with a two tone gold interior, a hemi V-8 and factory air. My father told me that he thought it was the most gorgeous car he had ever seen.

The second day he had it he ran out of gas because the guage didn't work. Some time later, the trunk lock stopped working. The drivers' window fell into the door during a rain storm. A torsion bar broke. After about a year and a half, my father went outside to start the car and it wouldn't.

He told my mother that that car needed to be gone when he came home from work. My mother traded it in that day on a 1959 Mercury Monterey convertible. My father always said that the Dodge was the worst car he ever owned. Every time I see one now, I wonder how anybody could have kept it alive for 50 years.

The Mercury had the largest windshield I have ever seen. When it was about three years old, it got a crack in the center top of the windshield. It went through three replacement windshields that all did the same thing in the same place. When the insurance company said no more winshields, father traded it in on a 1963 Buick Electra convertible.

There were probably more lemons built years ago than today. Whenever I think of the care we lavish on our cars, I imagine that long-dead car dealers, mechanics, and assembly line workers must be somewhere laughing at us.

[boblichty]

That is easy, in 1966 I was in collage and all my friends were buying foreign cars, one buddy bought a Triumph TR4, another got a Mini-Cooper, another an Alfa Romeo coupe, and I decided I wanted something different and British. I picked a new Sunbeam Imp. It was Rootes Group effort to compete with BMC's Mini. It packed a 850 cc overhead cam engine in the rear, handled well and looked like a sanforized Corvair with single headlamps. Only problem was it was a piece of #$*&*#. Honest, the dealer even told me not to buy it. He told me to spend the extra $50 for a MG 1100 Sport Sedan and I would not listen. After all at 20 I was a car expert! Now at 62 I have finally realized I really don't know "everything." Anyway, within the first 6 months it used up 5 water pumps, 3 u joints, a generator, two mufflers and failed to start more times than I can count. It had more miles hooked to a AAA tow truck that it ever did on it's own. Finally I gave up, and traded down in years to a 1963 Mercury Comet S-22 convertible with a 260 V8 automatic, which got me through all the remaining years of collage AND a daily 112 mile round trip commute from Akron, to Cleveland, Ohio.

[Guest sayhonkmon]

The chevy vega with the aluminum head that warped was the worse lemon that I owned.

[Harold]

It's a toss-up between my '70 LeMans and my '63 Lincoln. Neither one of them could run for more than a few weeks without a repair.

I sold the Pontiac to some kid, and a few weeks later was browsing in the local junkyard and there it was. The junk man said the engine went. The car still haunted me, though. A couple of months later, I saw another LeMans driving around with my front clip on it.

The Lincoln was difficult to work on as well as being unreliable. Three repair shops refused to put a water pump in it, so we did it ourselves. When someone finally bought it, the ball-and-socket accelerator linkage came apart under the car near the gas pedal. This thing was inside a boxed floor crossmember and it was 10 degrees and snowy at the time. I rigged-up a hand throttle consisting of a wire coat hanger attached to the carb and poked through a firewall grommet. I was very happy to see the buyer driving away, yanking on the coat hanger to accelerate!

[Guest leadsled1953]

if i rule out cars that had problems becaused i abused them or didnt know what i was doing when i worked on them i have two.a 1976 duster and a 84 monte carlo.the duster loved not starting from day one.no heat ,just one thing after another.the best was when it got to 10 below the horn would blow[at 3am ] the monte t tops leaked,transmission went,and the ignition lock would lock up.again one thing after another.and if i listed everything that happen to these cars my post would be 5 pages long.they were so bad that i wouldnt even use them as demolition derby cars.

[Barry Wolk]

I had a very good year in 1988. Flush with money from an investment payoff I bought myself BMW's top of the line 12-cylinder flagship.

I had been driving BMW's since '82. Hated my "eta" engined 528e so I traded it in on an '83 533i. Fastest 6-cylinder I ever drove. By the time the new 12-cylinder was announced I had 100,000 trouble-free miles on the 533i.

I ordered the upcoming 750iL and got the first one shipped into this country. It had been allocated to a combination GM/BMW dealer in the south. It was supposed to be a simple dealer swap, but the car took two weeks to show up in Michigan.

The dealer here didn't do any of the new-car delivery preps as they had supposedly been done at the original dealership. I drove the car home, just as pleased with myself as could be. I pulled up in the driveway and honked for my wife to come out and see my new prize. The horn sounded really wimpy. That was the first indicator of what was about to happen.

My wife came out and admired the car. I asked if she wanted to take it for a test drive and she decided to take it around the subdivision. We pulled back into the driveway and decided we needed to go out and celebrate. She went into the house to freshen up, but couldn't move the seat back to accommodate my extra 10" in height.

The seat wouldn't budge. I fiddled with the controls and the seat moved forward on its own, pinning me against the steering wheel. I managed to get the eat back to fold down and pushed myself into the back seat. I called the dealer to have them send a midget to drive the car back. They sent a flatbed with my 533i on it and took the 750il away.

I got it back and they told me that the seat wiring was all messed up, so they installed a new seat harness. Over the next two weeks the car became possessed with 25 DIFFERENT electrical problems cropping up. The windows and sunroof would open and close at will. The horn would sound for no apparent reason. The myriad of problems led to a meeting with the dealership's owner.

They decided to get me another car. By the time that car came from Germany they had fixed everything on the original car and the ghosts had gone away. It turned out that GM had gotten their hands on the new car and taken it apart to see what made it tick and failed to put it back together properly. Most of the problems turned out to be loose ground connection that made the electronics go haywire. It may seem astounding, but there's 29 MILES of wiring in that car.

When the new car arrived I went to the dealership to swap cars. I had already put 11,000 miles on the new car. I went to the dealer to pick up the new one and it was nowhere in sight. I had ordered the same Delphin Grey, but I didn't see it anywhere. As I was about to walk into the dealer I see a 750iL coming in on a flatbed. It was my car.

The dealer had spent a full two days prepping the new car to make sure I was satisfied. The car comes with a negative 200 miles on the odometer. The dealers are supposed to put 200 miles on it testing it. They had. The last test was to run through the gears manually on the automatic. Apparently someone at the Port of Entry in NJ had overfilled the trans, making it puke trans fluid all over the engine compartment. Told me to come back tomorrow after they cleaned up the car. No problem, what's one more day?

I picked up #2 the next day. I didn't make it 6 miles when steam started pouring out from under the hood as the temperature rose. I didn't look. I didn't care. I drove the car back to the dealer steaming. The car was steaming, as was I.

The owner saw me drive in and came out to greet me. He ushered me into his office to keep our conversation quiet. He got on the phone and called the district office for BMW in Chicago. He spoke some obviously anxious German to the man on the other end of the line and asked for my patience.

I sat in his office for two hours. The door opened and a very dapper man came in to greet me. While obviously German by his accent, he spoke perfect English. He was very apologetic that I had had so many problems with their flagship car. He said they were prepared to give me every cent back and buy my used car back from the dealer they sold it to. I wanted more.

I wanted a third car. I also wanted them to show me where they're built. I decided that a European delivery at their expense was the least they could do.

It turns out the radiator was made by an outside contractor, Behr, and that Behr had missed a weld on the aluminum radiator and painted over it. The paint held for the first 200 miles and let go on my way home.

They scheduled a trip for 8 weeks out. They put the radiator in #2 and it operated flawlessly. We left for the trip, flying first class to New York and then on Luftansa for the most lavish plane trip I had ever taken. The first class cabin had beds and a full staff to wait on us.

We got off the plane in Munich and were met by the Chairman's limousine, where we were whisked away to a 5-star hotel on Koenigstrasse in Munich. We settled in and got a call that our car wasn't ready yet, they needed one more day for testing. Our driver turned out to be a BMW VP in disguise. He was chosen by the Chairman as our driver because of his English skills.

Since the car wouldn't be ready we were asked to join our guide in the Chairman's lunch room at noon. We were presented with a lovely briefcase containing books and posters about the development of the new car. We then got an inside tour of the BMW Museum, right next door.

We went to pick up the car in their new car delivery center. The had it in a room under the harshest light. Any flaw stuck out like a sore thumb and I found one and pointed it out. They were aghast that they had missed something and refuses to give the car. A few muffled phone calls later our guide came back and told us that he was assigned to us for the long weekend, to pick up our car the following Tuesday.

He took us everywhere. The next day was a Friday so when got to see three of their plants in action. What an amazing tour that was. Over the weekend we went to many historical sites, including Eagle's Nest and Crazy Ludwig's castles.

By the time Tuesday came around we were fast friends with our guide. While he didn't understand some of our idioms, he had no problem understanding us. We were going to spend a couple of days driving the Autobahn and then ship the car home. Our guide offered to cruise with us on a 10-day excursion, that he had planned. All we had to pay for was our lodging, the gas and food went on his company card.

We went into about 10 countries in 10 days, the car performing flawlessly. At that point the 750iL was Export only and had never been seen anywhere in Europe. We were mobbed like rock stars everywhere we went. I must have opened the hood 100 times.

I got to drive the car as fast as it would go (155 mph) and put 3,000 miles on it in 10 days. We took it back to Munich to have it shipped home and parted company with our guide. It took 8 weeks to get #3 home. By that time I had put another 11,000 miles on #2.

The new car came in with all the bugs worked out. I still have the car, 22 years later. It currently has 77,000 miles on it and only gets used occasionally. But, when it does, it's a blast to drive.

Worst lemon I ever had, but best customer service story, ever.

Edited September 12, 2009 by Barry Wolk (see edit history)