I’ve daily’d many shitboxes of dubious functionality, but the most broken car I’ve ever driven regularly was a 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle.
I acquired it well-used, of course, as high school transpo in 1985. And to its credit, it was actually very reliable in terms of always getting me where I needed to go. It was less reliable at getting me to stop where I needed to stop, however.
At its best, the Beetle required the foresight of Nostradamus to drive safely. Thinking two moves ahead was not enough; I had to have a complete driveway-to-destination plan at all times. At its worst, the car basically had no brakes save for the parking brake, or as I called it, “the brake.” Which, honestly, worked OK enough if I was the only one in the car (more passengers = more mass = more inertia) and kept my head on a swivel. Hard braking, however – let alone emergency braking – was out of the question.
But what if I really needed more brakes? I once instructed a buddy in the passenger seat to open his door as I did the same while we were hurtling through an off-ramp that caught me off guard with a surprisingly aggressive decreasing radius. I figured deploying the doors like the dive brakes on an F-86 Sabre couldn’t hurt. Did they help? They must have done something, as it sure was hard to hold the doors open. The Beetle’s skinny tires barely held and we were halfway on the grass by the time we stopped inches short of the guy in front of us, but we did stop. I learned my lesson and got the brakes fixed immediately a month later.
The Beetle broke further soon after when its heater boxes rusted through, but I considered this an improvement as the Bug’s whistling exhaust note was now raucously loud with wonderful pops as I let off the gas. That’s my most-broken story; let’s hear what Mercedes and Torch have to say:
Mercedes
Oooh, it’s a toss up for me between a 2005 Volkswagen Passat TDI and a 2004 Nissan Maxima. First, the TDI. The transmission slammed each gear, eventually locking itself into second. The engine made no oil pressure, but somehow still ran, and the turbo was inoperable. Top speed was 60 mph and it took over a minute to get there.
The Maxima was worse. Each wheel had just two nuts, not even genuine lug nuts, just hardware store nuts that were hand-tight. The transmission valve body was shot, the engine made no oil pressure at idle thanks to a bad timing chain, the electrical system was barely hanging on, no power steering, bald tires, a melted rear bumper, and no coolant. I handled the lug nut situation by following a country boy back to his farm, where he had a table sitting outside with a bucket full of lug nuts. Problem solved. As for the other stuff: the car still went 100 mph, so those fixes could wait!
Torch
I either drove an extremely broken car OR I survived a very cunning murder attempt at the hands of our own David Tracy. When David was starting Project Postal, where he got an old mail Jeep and made it capable of driving to and tackling Moab off-roading, he offered me the chance to drive the thing a bit.
Now, this was before he’d done any real work on it, so it was in its worst possible state. And holy shit was that worst possible state the WORST possible state. Nothing on the chassis seemed to be really connected to any other thing, other than by wads of brown, flaky rust and vague concepts of intent. The thing ran, but the steering seemed to be operating on a sort of lackadaisical, whimsical idea of steering, where the direction the wheel turned only had the vaguest impact on the direction the car was pointed.
The whole body wallowed and swooned on the chassis like a tower of Jell-O on the saddle of a horse, and the brakes were like trying to slow yourself down on a slide by holding a piece of bread against the surface. This thing was an absolute nightmare deathtrap, and I drove it about 10 miles from David’s house to a karting track. It was the slowest, most terrifying drive I’ve ever experienced.
Your turn! What’s the most broken car you’ve driven?
1990 Taurus SHO. On paper ticked boxes. Manual, V6, 4 doors, etc.
Yet it has been in a major accident and fixed under the table, It had a host of problems.
1980 Mercedes 230G (G-wagon). No brakes. No synchros (crunch). No seats (milk crate special). No power (running on 3 of 4 cylinders). God I miss that beast.
I guess the ‘69 C10 I drove through college was probably the worst. Manual steering had about a quarter turn of free play in it, manual brakes took 2 good pumps before there was brake pressure (I actually did fix that), heater only worked in the summer, radio worked but the exhaust exited out at the doors so it was too loud to hear anyways. The rear cab mounts were completely gone and the bed was rusted out. The 3-speed had crudely been converted to floor shift, but 1st gear the shifter actually pushed back into the seat.
But with a 350 out of a Z28 and 4.11s, none of that mattered because burnouts.
And then it burned up in an electrical fire.
That would have to be my 1983 Citroën 2CV, which only 11 years old broke it’s chassis ladder frame due to rust, so steering became very heavy and clutch started slipping.
The summer between HS and College my car died its final death and I needed a new car but had no money. I was working at KFC that summer and a coworker had a car she agreed to sell to me for $500 (about the amount of my next paycheck). That car ended up being a 1981 Datsun 200SX which would have been well over a decade old at that point. That, hands down, is the best $500 I’ve ever spent and far and away the most broken car I’ve driven. When I bought it, no radio, no speedometer, no weather stripping between the windows, no HVAC (not even fans), some sort of electrical drain so I had to disconnect the battery if I left it parked more than a few hours, and the rear shocks were not shocking anymore at all. As if all that’s not enough a friend broke the key the first week I owned it. We shoved the broken part in the ignition and after that we were able to turn it with a screwdriver to start the car. Another friend “accidentally” caved in my windshield so I drove it looking through a kaleidoscope for months. Now, this car had a 5-speed, RWD, the aforementioned busted shocks, and it had a handbrake so it was sideways more often than not which made tires short lived, but remember I had no cash so I found a place in town that sold $40 used tires. As a result all 4 tires were different brands but I had 1 good Pirelli I was irrationally proud of. The car burned so much oil I never bothered doing an oil change just topped it off every other fuel stop. The alternator belt would often get loose, which was because the pulley was wearing out so I’d just lean on it with a crowbar then tighten it back down.
One day the right-rear brake caliper fell off, I managed to put it back on with a wire coathanger in order to get home. My passenger was not thrilled.
One day the passenger-side tie rod physically separated while I was going down the freeway. I went from “what’s that clanking dragging sound under the car?” to TURNING LEFT and before I could figure out what was happening the car TURNED RIGHT. That was a fun drive home.
Remember those shocks that haven’t been shocking all along, well if you hit a pot hole at speed the rear axle would react unpredictably so you always had to be ready for an unexpected lane change. I’d been driving it like that for the better part of a year, 3 hours to college and back every weekend, managing to keep it between the ditches…then one day my mom borrowed the car. It terrified her and she banned it from being driven on the street until I replaced the shocks.
So many fun stories in that car, to this day it’s my measuring stick for how much fun you can have with $500. I drove it WOT everywhere speed shifting between every gear, and through it all it returned a solid 40MPG.
I finally drove it off the road one night and crushed the front suspension and cracked the radiator…the damn thing still drove me home though.
This is gonna be good.
I had a 1995 BMW 5-series. It fell apart around me. It had a huge oil leak, a huge tranny leak. None of the windows went down. No heat. No A/C. One brake light. No high beams. Falling headliner. Power seats were frozen in position. No airbags. It was completely slammed and scaped over speed bumps. Clearcoat was peeling all over.
But oh my god was the engine sweet. It had the small 3-liter V8 and that thing sang. It was smooth and powerful and sounded great. Almost made the rest of the car worth it.
Working in 1986, I had to drive my boss’ old 1977 Pontiac Sunfire (Chevy Monza clone) to pick up a load of sod for his yard. The Iron Puke barely had any compression left, the transmission wouldn’t shift into 3rd, the brakes were “all the way and pray”, and with several tons of sod in the back, the leaf springs broke and the rear bumper was dragging.
Also, the seats were ripped, the windshield leaked, the tires were bald, and there was no headliner, radio, or seat belts.
Oh, but I think the A/C worked.
1982 Dodge “charger” with the 2.2 and automatic. Drove it through several years of college. It wasn’t a *bad* car but I was broke and maintenance was, well, whatever I could afford and do in an apartment parking lot or college parking garage. Highlights include:
I put a lot of miles on that sucker, but it was never what I would consider a reliable ride.
The other bad one was the early 60’s Ford pickup my brother and I shared in high school. The carb would randomly catch fire on startup and we learned to start it with the hood popped a bit to look for flames. We eventually got to where we could blow out the fire without killing the engine. Why yes, Dad loved his cheap cars – why do you ask?
I’ve driven (I hesitate to say “raced”) some pretty crappy cars in the 24 Hours of Lemons, but the ’86 Hyundai Excel has to take the cake. Apart from being horribly slow and handling like a giraffe on rollerskates, the example I was driving had a failing head gasket. So we routed the coolant overflow hose under the passenger side wiper blade, and when you started to see brown mud on the windshield, it was your sign to back off and take it easy.
We later “fixed” the issue by replacing the head gasket which involved “machining” the cylinder head by taping sandpaper to a table and pushing the head back and forth. It surprisingly worked well enough to last the 2nd day of racing.
When we swapped our 86 Subaru XT turbo drivetrain with one from a 2004 WRX we never really got the car going outside of limp mode until after the race had already started. Subaru over-engineers their evap system… I was the first to drive it and the first to hit boost. OMG was that car stupid fast. I then found out at the end of the long straight at Gingerman in MI that the XT had a check valve in the intake going to the brake booster, and the WRX puts their check valve in the booster. As we were using the XT booster, we therefore had no check valve. For the first 3 seconds after taking your foot off the throttle you’re fighting about 12psi of boost pressurizing the booster, and then instantly it switches to about 10psi of vacuum.
This is awesome.
I valet parked cars for a very fancy restaurant in downtown Minneapolis one winter as a second job. Got to drive some pretty cool stuff, but also drove some dogs. Worst by far was a beat to hell Tahoe that had no brakes. Like NO brakes. Had to constantly pump them at a stoplight to keep it from rolling forward. Told the lady when she went to come get it and she seemed unphased.
These people are on the streets with us…
My own. It didn’t run very long before it would stall out at the most inconvenient time and take anywhere from 5 seconds to 10 minutes to restart, and then you were still on borrowed time. The first time it happened was on a rainy night on a 60mph road people regularly do 90 on, with no shoulder. I was nearly hit multiple times.
Meanwhile, my brother owned a Nissan with an Xtronic CVT, and it didn’t stall out randomly. I don’t think this is a coincidence
Now I’m wondering if this is something all VW owners do at least once, but I had a different reason for trying it.
When my dad was a yute, a friend of his had a two-stroke Saab. It was a pretty lightweight car and they – being knuckleheads – had discovered they could steer the car on faster roads simply by manipulating the aero properties, i.e. opening one of the doors.
When I had the Super Beetle, a friend and I were rolling down a long hill and I relayed the Saab story. With no convincing at all he agreed to participate. I put the car in neutral at 45mph and counted down three, two, one, GO! We flung the doors open more or less evenly and held them there.
The speedometer needle dropped like a rock and we laughed ourselves stupid[er].
EDIT: forgot the broken car thing. It was a 1987 Oldsmobile Calais (2dr, V6). The dash lights didn’t work and the engine management abacus would randomly call in sick. It would run on (I think) one bank of three cylinders for a while and would get really hot, and just when I decided to shut it down (and not actively kill it) it would un-screw itself and run normally for a while. A road trip was a tense affair.
As many Autopians will not doubt find we have several contenders in our rusted out past. I am no exception, so I will limit my response to the top 3. I also am not counting the ones that I drove once and then burned my underpants and only include rigs I willfully drove again and again knowing the inherent deathtrappery.
No. 3 1955 Ford pickup.
Primer gray, had a Mustang 289 with an auto and B&M Quick Click shifter. Fun as hell to drive, but had 180 degrees of play in the wheel and was totally haunted. And by haunted I mean you would sit at a stoplight and without touching the gas pedal it would slowly rev up until it redlined. I once did an unintended tire roast at a light as i held the brake as hard as I could while it revved itself. Clicking into neutral ended the runaway but it happened at least once a drive. Even happened to a mechanic driving it into the work bay. I warned him but he said he had to drive it. He panicked and shut it off. Turns out it had broken motor mounts and solid accelerator linkage which caused a cascading fail. And…what seat belts?
No.2 1972 Pontiac LeMans
Legend has it this car was a stunt car in the movie Trouble In Mind which was shot in Seattle and played a police car. I have the movie on DVD and only saw a very brief glimpse of a LeMans so I cannot confirm. I can verify that the passenger side was solid Bondo from bumper to bumper so the door never opened and the brakes regularly failed, including once going down a Seattle hill with my girlfriend at the time across an intersection roundabout and only stopping on the sidewalk after I got a quick pump on the brakes. I was once pulled over in it and was subsequently descended upon by 8 cop cars and police with guns ready because I matched the name and description of a know criminal. ( I am unknown) And carrying on with the theme, no seat belts and I opened the truck with a screwdriver.
Honorable Mention: 1969 Triumph GT6+ with rusted out floorboards which will cause drowning when going through puddles and after 6 months it threw a rod literally through the side of the motor. Plus…Lucas!
No. 1 1966 Olds 442
What can I say? I traded a tape deck for it. It wasn’t running yet parked on the street in Seattle. It had a massive engine although I couldn’t tell you what it was. Rested quarter panels, seats were not bolted in (surprise!) and transmission was shot. I replaced the tranny on the street (DT would be proud) with a boneyard 4 speed out of an 82 Camaro which had the shifter on the wrong side so I just cut out the floorboards and swapped my shifter over, which also swapped the shift pattern plus creating an 8 inch hole in the car where I could see the road. Brakes leaked and if I didn’t top off daily they failed so I regularly had to use the clutch at stoplights and to parallel park on the hills of Seattle. Low beams didn’t work. I drove it for 3 months. Still not sure how I survived.
96 ford bronco that is now my daily. When I purchased it I had to drive it approx. 150 miles home. It ran just fine, stopped ok, but the steering was nowhere to be found. Every joint between the steering wheel and the actual wheels was completely worn out. Not only that but the steering shaft bushings were also gone. This meant that not only was the steering all over the place but the actual steering wheel moved around. When you tried to turn it the actual wheel moved to the left and right. It also moved up and down. For those of you that have had an obs ford you know what I’m talking about. Doing highway speeds was utterly terrifying.
How loosely are we using the term drove? I once flat towed a first generation Talon for my friend. By which I mean we hooked it to a chain connected to the back of a Silverado and I sat in the Talon, which had no engine, and steered for 45 min. It was terrifying. There were obviously no power brakes so in an emergency stop situation I had to floor the brake pedal with both feet while yanking up on the e-brake. Also no powersteering although that wasn’t much of an issue. There was a key in the ignition to prevent the steering locking up but no battery so the air bag didn’t accidently go off. We made it but there were a few moments where I thought poo was going to happen.
It wasn’t really “broken”, but I had a 6 month stretch where I kept trying and failing to fix the powertrain electronics in my 2009 Escape. It randomly would go into limp mode and I would have to pull over and restart it before I could keep driving. I got pretty good at planning my routes to make sure I was always somewhere I could safely pull over with the remaining momentum. The interstate? Aw Hell to the no. I didn’t have a death wish. The Escape had no other major issues. My old 1994 Villager had more individual deficits, but at least I could drive it at 70mph without worrying about my safety. Because of the seriousness of its problem the Escape qualifies as my most broken car.
My first vehicle, that dreaded ’06 Dakota.
Short list was; destroyed front driveshaft, destroyed transfer case (at the front end for the driveshaft), the radiator support (even after the replacement) and the front stab links being broken.
And that wasn’t even the parts that needed to be replaced due to age, like everything with a rubber mounts and bushings.
I drove my E36 to the shop with a completely gone clutch, and I had to drive the beige unicorn home from Aldi in lunch hour traffic with the rear brake line blown out, which was FU(n)
I worked as a fueler at a small local airport for a while. The 100LL truck was only a working vehicle in the sense that it could move, stop, and the PTO was able to power the pump. Nothing else worked on this thing and the steering was so incredibly terrible that the only way it was controllable was by never driving it over 10mph, which was fine on an airport.
I borrowed a Chevy Lumina APV with 192k miles on it from a friend of mine, who used it for his restaurant exhaust vent cleaning business. The side view mirror glass was cosmetic mirrors glued in place over the mirror frames. It had a ladder rack made of 1/2″ galvanized pipe screwed into the roof skin and “sealed” with painter’s caulk. Every single thing on the interior was broken or missing. Mechanically the alternator howled like it was begging you to take it out back and shoot it. The motor mounts were broken and it would flop about on acceleration/deceleration. It mis-fired like crazy. The relationship between the seat bottom and the gas pedal was so awkward, you had to practically break your foot bending it so far back to operate the pedal. Something I would later learn is a dustbuster van trait, when I drove a “good” one years later. Side note: the only good dust buster van is a crushed dust buster van. Vile pieces of shit. Anyways, in true GM fashion though, this utter pile of garbage just would not quit. ‘Tis but a flesh wound!
When I gave my friend his van back, I asked him why he didn’t at least get his motor mounts fixed. His response, “I didn’t know they were broken.” I just stood there in stunned silence, and then he said the most amazing thing anybody has ever said to me in regards to a complete and utter shitbox. “You know, that thing is still under warranty.”
“Come again?” I said, “How is that even possible?”
“Well, I bought it new, and when I bought it, I decided it was going to last me 200 thousand miles. So I bought a 200 thousand mile warranty.”
When I saw him again a few weeks later, he thanked me for pointing out the broken motor mounts, and said he got a bunch of things fixed under warranty.
That’s amazing. Probably found out it had been driving with a blown intake gasket for a solid year while they were doing those mounts.
Wouldn’t doubt it for a second.
My first car, purchased with $1500 worth of firewood splitting cash at the tender age of 15. A 1978 CJ7. The frame was cracked in 3 places, so much so that the steering box actually would move the frame out of place when turning. Not sure if the box was worn, or if it was the frame flexing, but it was a HANDFUL to keep between the lines. The belt driven transfer case jumped teeth at anything over half throttle, which was fine because from 3/4 throttle and beyond, all it did was spit flames out of the carb. It had a 90’s marine radio with a cassette player that didn’t work, which was fine, because there were no speakers. No heater, and the only switch on the dash that did anything was the headlights. It topped out at about 40 mph, because 3rd gear had left the chat somewhere back during the Reagan administration. It leaked oil like crazy out of the rear main.
The windshield wipers didn’t do much, only working on thier lowest setting. Which was fine, really, because it had no top anyway.
On the 5 mile maiden voyage from the previous owner’s house to mine, I also discovered the seats were not bolted down.
But hey, I learned basic wiring, how to fiddle with a carb, how to make some decent bubblegum welds, and managed to drive it to school for a few weeks before my Dad found out what an unsafe pile of garbage it was, and he made me sell it. I ended up getting a mint 5 speed Geo Tracker, so not all was lost.
But man, driving that thing even 5 miles up the road was an ADVENTURE.
That’s easy since I just recently bought it, Project BRAT, my rusty 1985 Subaru BRAT. With help from a friend I got it running, but that’s pushing it. I mean, the engine runs great, but the rear suspension has a lot of rust, as does the frame in the back. The gas tank is pretty gummed up so we ran the fuel line to a gas can. I am yet to get the brakes sorted. It’ll come to a stop if you pump them, but the pedal will be at the floor. And the clutch seems to be wearing pretty thin. But I drove it. So yay.
From 1995-2000 I had a 70 jeepster commando that leaked EVERY fluid (including from the gas tank) and the headlights would periodically just stop working and did not have heat. I drove it in well below zero weather in a parka and snow pants wile icescraping the INSIDE of the windshield as I drove. It should have been a trailer queen for off roading but it was my daily driver. Once it was too cold, some of those years I had a $100 Buick LeSabre that kept eating junkyard transmissions but at least had heat.
1980 Pontiac Catalina Safari diesel wagon that had been sitting for 10 years and was started using a few splashes of gasoline down the hole. 10 minutes later I was driving it home at ~20mph with one front brake sort of working, when an enormous hornet nest INSIDE the back came to life about half way through the trip. Bzzzzzzz AUUGHHH AUUUUGH AaaaahhHHHH!
Ah, hornets, there’s your problem. For a while I had a ’65 Corvair convertible with a bumblebee nest under the rear seat. They never bothered me and I never bothered them. They were still there when I got rid of the car. It’s probably just as well that I never had any rear seat passengers, though.
By the way, yes, I did warn the new owner.
Hornets ate jerks. Bees can be pretty chill.
Now I’m wondering if the bumblebees liked the car because it would drive somewhere, they’d go out and sample the local nectar, and then drive back to their “home” base without them having to fly the whole distance. Smart bees.
Also, I’m imagining listing this car in classifieds. “Runs and drives. Radio works, but only seems to play “Flight of the Bumblebee”
In this case it would have been more accurate to say “Radio doesn’t work. Car nonetheless continuously plays ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ in multi-channel sound with rear fader.”