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?
74 Ford Ranchero…..
Now by the time I got to drive it in the mid 90s, it had been thru so much Im surprised it was still driveable. At 1 time, many years before, my dad drove it to the Iowa State Fair, parked it in a slight depression, and while him and my uncles were getting “tuned up” a.k.a. “drunk” it had rained like a mutha! They got back to the car and that depression had filled up with water, and the water covered 2/3 of the tires, so it was pretty deep water. They climbed in, fired it up, and drove out. As my dad told me years later if it had backfired it woulda swallowed 10 gallons of water thru the tailpipe.
And then a few years later after he moved to Chicagos west burbs, he was getting “tuned up” again… left the bar, got caught on the center median, walked back into the bar, grabbed a pool cue and was trying to pry it off the median.
Anyway fast forward about 18 years to when I drove it…..
There was about 6 to 8 inches of play in the steering wheel trying to drive it down the road, the transmission slipped so bad in 1st gear you basically had to idle away from any stop sign or light. And the floorboards were so rusted away (courtesy of the Iowa St. Fair) you could see the pavement as you drove down the road. Im surprised I didnt fall thru just sitting in the seats…..
My brother’s ’88 Volvo 760 sedan was probably it… I was borrowing it for a while due to the freeze plugs behind the flywheel popping out on the RX-7 (not from frozen coolant though, it was a warm-ish day and happened about 20 min into a drive), and it started out well enough for a $600 car. It ran, it shifted through 3 of the 4 gears (overdrive was controlled via a separate solenoid valve that had failed, and thus wouldn’t engage), and was a tank in snow even with whatever all-seasons came on it from the previous owner. However, shortly after I got the OD working, electrical problems began. This was the era of biodegradable wiring insulation, and it was biodegrading while still in use. I patched up or replaced a few of the harnesses around the engine and fuse boxes over the months that I was borrowing it, but these only ever offered a small reprieve from the gremlins. Eventually, it would only run at idle, when warming up, or at WOT – any time it would drop into closed-loop O2 mode (my theory at least), it would just die. This made for a very interesting driving style, especially in the snow or during the 600 mile drives between my college apartment and parents home… floor it up to about 85 mph, coast down to about 55 mph and repeat.
The best part was that shortly after I got the RX-7 fixed, the volvo-saurus was cash-for-clunkered by my dad for the full $4500 since it had the PRV-V6… definitely paid for itself despite the issues!
The Altima earned its “Failtima” nickname from consuming its own head gasket and then shutting off the aircon to try and avoid overheating…in August……in Texas. That one’s more defined by how often I was NOT driving it, though. It was always in the damn shop.
The Volkswagen 411 is probably it. The team who handed it off to me didn’t have all of the cooling tins, so we were racing without them. This resulted in us basically driving to the temperature gauge, which made it painfully slow on track. We got IOE, though. Hell yeah.