Fear, I’m told, is the mind-killer, but sometimes it’s also a handy way of letting us know that, for example, the hunk of crap car you’re driving is dangerous deathtrap. And often, that’s good information to have! As an example from my personal life, when I drove David’s old Postal Jeep a few years back, the visceral fear I felt upon realizing that the motions I was making with the steering wheel had a very inconsistent and perhaps even cavalier relationship with the direction the car would progress on the road was in fact a potent alert that, hey, this thing is a rusty, jagged, boxy coffin. And that, as I said, is good information to have.
I should note that this was before David did any mechanical work on the thing, and at that point the Postal Jeep had most of its suspension and steering components connected to the rusty frame with nothing stronger than a conceptual connection and maybe some decorative stickers. The brakes didn’t do a whole hell of a lot either, and I’m frankly amazed I was able to drive it the few miles I did without some sort of disaster happening.
For this car to scare me, even at low speeds, I think is quite a triumph, because, remember, I’m a veteran of the infamous Hoffman:
…and the amazing Helicron, which very much wants to mulch you into paté:
And yet, even compared with the perverse peculiarity of the Hoffmann and the swirling blades of the Helicron, David’s old Postal Jeep (shown below) somehow felt scarier. Maybe because I had it out on public roads, with plenty of traffic. Maybe it was the cold weather, which threatened to make any impact into the windshield feel even worse. Or maybe it was that the body really wasn’t all that connected to the frame. Maybe all of it.
And that was low-speed driving! I bet there’s many tales you have of cars that are scary at speed, or a car that just scared you, not for physics-related reasons, but for more metaphysical reasons, deeper, stranger things.
Point is, I know you’ve all experienced some car that scared you in some way, and I want you to tell us all about it now, so that we may grow, and, ideally, heal. Because that car is no longer here to terrify you anymore.
I hope.
I race a Lotus. From the 1950s. At 130+mph. With amateurs.
Not all heroes wear capes.
There’s a fine line between heroism and stupidity…
Finding that line is the reason we’re all here.
Good point! I forget where I was at for a minute there. Carry on.
You probably don’t want to wear a cape in a 1950s Lotus.
I read that as ‘not all herpes wear capes’. Pretty much the same effect
Herpes and heroes definitely have different effects. One shows up right when you need it, the other… doesn’t.
My dad has a grain truck – a ’60s GMC commonly called the “one ton” on the farm – which had bad brakes. For reasons known only to him, he didn’t actually fix the brakes. So you had a truck, full of grain, which didn’t stop in the traditional way. This was a frequent source of butthole clenching.
Heh, sketchy grain trucks are the best. I used to help an older farmer at harvest when I had spare time at the farm. His fleet of grain trucks was always exciting to drive, just not in the best way. My favorite was the ‘75 C60 with no floorboards. The 366 really sounded good and though the 2-speed rear didn’t work, it was genuinely a fun truck to drive.
One day the C60 was down so I started hauling with his Ford 7000. It had a Cat diesel and a working 5+2 (except when the rear would pop out of gear which was always fun), but that day on the first load I knew immediately the clutch was on its way out. After the second load I lost the clutch entirely on the way back to the farm. I switched over to a Mack of indeterminate origin. Coming out of the field with the third load, I heard a “psssasssh” and lost all steering, ruptured hydraulic line. Barely missed the on-farm grain tank before getting it stopped. I switched back over to the Ford…I think I had to start the truck in gear and then had to leave it in 2nd in order to move.
Back in the early 90s I was looking for a cheap Jeep to get me up the mountain during snowy winter commute days. A contract employee on one of our projects lived out near me and said he had a 1974 CJ 5 that he’d “done some work on.” The body was solid, the soft top intact and it started right up. It was a V8 and lumpy idle should’ve alerted me to something unusual, but hey, it was cheap. I kicked him the $400 he was was asking and drove off. This Jeep had AMC’s 304 V8 under the hood and the work done on it was adding a Holley 4-barrel, custom exhaust headers, a radical cam, and various and sundry other hotrod mods that turned the Jeep into a killer. If I barely feathered the throttle the rearend would break loose and smoke the fat tires. It reached death wobble speeds in a heartbeat and weak brakes did not inspire confidence. It was a nightmare on wet pavement and in snow. I finally sold it after a harrowing moment when climbing the hill to my house on a slippery road I gave it a bit too much throttle trying to maintain headway and the back end swung off the road and hung over a 50 foot drop off. Fortunately, it balanced on the edge and, equally fortunate, it had a winch which could reach a sizable tree across the road. I got it back on the road and made it home determined to part with the Jeep. A month later I replaced it with a CJ 8 running a 258 inline six. Much more tractable vehicle. Road Jeeps should not be hotrods. .
Scary good: 1958 Corvette with a 4 speed. Massive power, no control, owner in the passenger seat egging me on. Got it up to 80, then stepped on the brakes and ot felt like someone stuck a block of wood under the pedal. No seatbelts, either.
Scary bad: my friend’s 1980 Mustang in college. 200 inline six with an automatic. Wouldn’t idle, so you had to two-foot it at stop lights. Pulled hard to the left, until you hit a bump the wrong way, which would make it straighten out violently. Also had very little in the way of brakes. I only asked to borrow it the one time.
FIL is off to Florida and asks me to run one of his cars from an unheated garage across town to his heated house garage so it doesn’t freeze over the winter.
I show up to the garage and it’s a RHD morgan roadster. And it’s about 40 degrees outside.
Damn thing won’t idle unless I’m on the throttle cause it’s british (and maybe because its cold). My face and hands are numb and I’m trying to shift left-handed while keeping it from rolling backwards at a light while keeping it from stalling with some generous throttle application.
Steering wanders like most british cars I’ve driven and I’m sawing the wheel back and forth. I finally find my street to turn on and hit the brakes. Damn things are so unbalanced that it pulls me into oncoming traffic. I can hardly get it back in my lane to avoid oncoming traffic, almost decide to ditch it into the field but barely manage to get back in my lane and make my turn.
Sharp turn into a driveway that is up-hill and dead ends into the garage. At this point I could care less about the clutch, redline that thing and ride the clutch into the garage. smells like it’s gunna burn down, and I kinda hoped it would.
I was expecting something with a roof, that ran on its own, and maybe didn’t try to kill me. Now I ask what the hell I’m getting into before I’m throwing the garage door open.
I can’t help but picture the Simpsons where Homer discovers a Morgan Super Sports in the back of a garage and becomes a celebrity driving it around town.
A pretty deep cut for that show, esp. for a recent (like year 28) episode.
The scariest car I ever drove was a brand new 911 Turbo cabriolet that I was moving around the lot at the dealership I was working at in order to place in to take a picture of our newly renovated showroom, simply because at $200k+, it was by far the most expensive car I’d driven to that point, and cost more than our first house.
In terms of performance or sketchiness, nothing has really scared me like navigating a crazy-expensive car through a labryinth of other crazy-expensive cars.
I’ve had bad experiences with 2016ish Sonatas – for the most part, normal cars, but a complete lack of steering feel was pucker-inducting trying to drive like 5 hours through a snow storm on the highway (especially with no snow tires), and the dash glare on another was blinding coming in and out of the sun on the road to Hana in Maui (tight, curving road overrun with tourists such as myself and locals annoyed with the tourists).
A 1965 International Harvester Loadstar cabover stake body truck that my employer had on hand for paint deliveries to local shipyards. The steering had a dead spot of about 6 inches from center and we had to steer it by nudging the wheel towards the direction where it became effective. Seawater finally consumed the beast when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.
Well, we had a 1974 Suburban at work that was taken off the road because all the body mounts had rusted out, we kept using it on the property for over a decade, including going up and down a deep gorge down a narrow, unpaved mile long access road with a steep drop on one side. The floors were just carpet with nothing under them, and for the last few years, only 1st and 3rd worked on the transmission, you had to drive up a hill, put it in neutral, and let it roll backward to reverse. Also, the driver’s window was rigged to prevent it from closing all the way, as a workaround for the entire exhaust system rusting off. One year, it was left to sit over the winter without being driven, and wouldn’t go into gear at all, but it turned out the transmission was just totally dry, refilled, and it moved again.
But, you know what? The 350 ran fantastic to the end with minimal oil leaks, and the seats were still comfy.
It was eventually retired when the boss overheard employees talking about the reverse procedure, he had no idea the truck had gotten that bad and decided it was a safety issue. Everything that could be easily removed was taken off as spare parts for our other Suburbans and the hulk was sold for scrap.
My father in law has a lifted CJ7 that he bought to fix up for his grandson (my nephew). And by “fix it up” I mean “pay someone else to fix it up”. That person told him that he couldn’t find parts for the engine anymore (wut?) and convinced him to let him drop in an SBC. Which would be awesome under other circumstances. But.
I finally got a chance to drive it once, and the steering and brakes are in such ridiculously horrid condition that I couldn’t get out of that thing fast enough. It’ll rocket forward in a straight line, but god help you if you need to turn or stop. I would turn the wheel one direction and the wheels would stay straight until I hit about 90 degrees. Then the wheels would stay in that position until I cranked the wheel back 90 degrees the other way. My nephew doesn’t want it, so my FIL uses it to drive to the dump and back on a regular basis. I wouldn’t leave the subdivision in that deathtrap. How he’s not dead already is a miracle. I’d be happy to fix it for him, but he’s 700 miles away and a stubborn old bastard that refuses to admit when he can’t handle something.
Was this thing in Virginia Beach, VA?
Couple states away. Probably not an uncommon story, though.
I was 15 years old and my crazy uncle that races cars told me lets go for a spin on my car. He was visiting town and my happy look changed to almost sh!t my pants when I saw it was a SN Mustang Cobra. I only drove it for a few blocks and never crossed first gear because the noise and everything about it made me sick. Then he started to drive like a maniac but having so much control of the car, much respect.
The next year he showed up in a NA Miata, that one I was so happy to drive lol
Gas powered Uhaul box truck with a car trailer on the back carrying a 99 Cavalier. In the snowy hills. I was in my early 20’s moving for my first job out of school. 1,800 or so miles.
oooh we could probably have a whole section of sketchy uhauls
Are U-Hauls really hit-or-miss? I’ve only driven one but it seemed…fine?
This was 1-2 years ago, a 2012 Chevy Express 10′ box truck.
I have rented ones that popped out of gear, had bald tires and were ‘in town’ only
Okay, so I was a teenage
carneyride operator at Legoland. This is important backstory. The employee parking lot was (probably still is, I guess) at the top of a steep hill. At the bottom of said hill is a major, six-lane, 55MPH road. I would have been 17, maybe 18.Leaving work one day in my trusty ’65 Corvair. No sign of anything amiss until I turn out of the parking lot, headed down that hill toward that major artery. NO BRAKES. Pedal just goes right to the floor. I gripped that skinny plastic steering wheel for my life, said a little prayer, fortunately hit a green light at the bottom of the hill, and made the turn onto the six-lane road on two wheels (not really, but that little car was truckin’). A mile or two down the road I managed to turn into a gas station and coast to a stop in one of the parking spots in front of the minimart.
Heck of a way to learn what a leaky brake line can do.
I know that hill LOL
Honorable mention: U-Hauls are almost always the worst. Longtime residents of the Washington, DC area still talk about the “Snowmageddon” of 2010, which started literally the moment I started driving a U-Haul full of all my stuff, and towing the aforementioned Corvair, out of town to move back to California. After crawling down I-95 for a couple of hours in the snow, my genius ass decides to get off the freeway and take the backroads between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. At this point, not only was it snowing heavily, but it was also dark. I still don’t know how I made it to Charlottesville.
UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED
Cliché perhaps but true for me – Porsche 911.
All seems fine and stable when you’re going straight, what could go wrong, but as soon as you get any little thing incorrect in a turn, it’s scary how fast and violently that rear end swings around on you.
I got to thinking about this.. all my old junky stuff I’ve owned I haven’t been as scared because I KNOW their limitations and use a little more proactive driving.
The two that have really scared me are modern cars.. my wife’s Subaru one time did an emergency brake on an open road, somewhat scary. My Chevy Silverado work truck on the other hand.. I had the damn brake pedal fall to the floor mid u-turn! Thank god I could roll it into a parking lot and I didn’t lose that pedal in an emergency situation.
An approximately 30 year old 20′ box truck that a borrowed from my employer at the time to move myself into a new apartment. It was a manual, and I had never driven stick anything other than the Saab I had owned 4 years prior. I was young, dumb, and wayyyyyy over my head that Saturday morning.
You do not want to be driving a massive, manual transmission box truck that you don’t own through the narrow streets of Albany. I hit every damn red light on every damn hill. And boy did that clutch weight a zillion pounds (estimate). Also, it was January.
Somehow I survived, but my fiancé (the wedding was a few weeks away) got to watch me oscillate from overly confident moron to panic attack putz about a dozen times. Was not my shining moment, lol.
I did own a 30-year-old Jeepster commando once.
Love these. Like all SWB Jeeps, they can bite.
I’ve had a lot of “scary” cars. I think the win goes to one of my current fleet, though – my 1980 Triumph Spitfire. It does not have an overdrive and I made the mistake of taking it on I-264. This was before I realized the speedometer was off and when it said “60”, you were really going “50.” So I was struggling to do 50-55 on a interstate where everyone ignores the shit out of the 55 speed limit and goes 80-100. I was gripping the wooden MoMo steering wheel so hard that when I finally got where I was going my hands were tingling. I have since then avoided taking that car on an interstate at all costs. From the driver’s seat of that Spitfire, you can reach over the door and nearly touch the road with your fingertips. It feels like it would disintegrate in a wreck. But it’s also fun and everyone thinks it’s cute.
Honorable mention goes to the one motorcycle I owned – a late 70’s Honda CM400. I learned to ride on it and rode it for about a year. It was terrifying. I was not built for this. I never dropped it, but I had too many close encounters, including coming within an inch of sandwiching my leg into a Ford Ranger when I couldn’t make a turn tight enough. It felt cool. It looked cool. It was NOT for me.
My GT6 is pretty terrifying on the highway, too, seeing as how it’s a tinfoil canister surrounded by three-ton behemoths carrying as much destructive energy as an air-to-ground missile. On the bright side, at least it’ll keep up with traffic if I need it to. 5500rpm, but it’ll get there.
Probably the worst was my college roommate’s 1981 Olds Cutlass sedan. It had the carbureted 3.8 v6, which ran okay-ish. Reliably, in any case. The brakes were even pretty functional.
The scary thing was the steering. When I had occasion to drive it I was cautioned never to turn the steering wheel to full lock. You see, if you do so, the steering wheel would return to a different center than where it started from; this was because the frame where the steering box was attached was rusted through on 3 out of 4 sides, so if you turned it to full lock the power assist would bend the rusty flap that it was bolted to into a new, slightly different steering geometry. O.o
To combat this, the owner had wrapped baling wire as tightly as he could around the steering box and frame, but even he admitted it was a temporary fix at best.
When I worked at a rental car company I had to regularly drive Chevrolet Metros to and fro. Driving around town wasn’t too bad, but merging onto the highway is terrifying in a way that words cannot express. It was slow, sure, but what made it truly scarry was the sonorous thrashing of the engine coming through was might have been the thinnest bits of interior plastic and exterior metal I have ever encountered. This was early aughts GM, mind you, and the knowledge that one tiny accident could result in your demise was always front-and-center.
A Model S P85D I drove briefly in High School for a project. A friends parent ran the local Tesla Service Center and let me get behind the wheel of their loaner, and 18 year old me was so intimidated I couldn’t even bring myself to fully mash the go pedal. My friends parent was far less careful, even floored it when my dad was unbuckled in the back seat getting some video, needless to say the GoPro camera footage of him get slammed without warning is some my favorite I’ve ever gotten. Say what you will about Tesla, but even their 8 year old performance models are absurdly quick.
A Suzuki Samurai came in to our shop for an out of province inspection. It was lifted with disintegrating hockey pucks on the frame mounts. I got it up to 80km/h on the highway, and it was legitimately terrifying(and I’ve ridden that fast on a road bike, so I know terrifying unprotected speeds). Needless to say it did not pass. Both times he tried.
Ever been retroactively scared?
Buddy bought a 260Z that had a built SBC and an M22 “Rock Crusher” trans shoehorned into it.
I was brought along on the first look at it when he was going to buy it as I was mildly more of a wrencher than he was, and he was hoping I’d catch something he wouldn’t.
Guy took us both on a drive, he got back and was white as a sheet. I got in it and soon found out why.
Owner beat on that thing like it owed him money and had talked shit about his mama. Bangshifting it, no brake-corners, just gearing down and whipping it through. I swear to baby jesus that we got up on two wheels at one point.
Get back, friend buys it.
Next day we’re driving around on base, checking it out a little more in our own time. Get back to the barracks and pop the hood and start poking around.
The brake MC has been leaking the entire time. Concerning, but not scary. He drove it to get gas and he completely lost pedal. Blew an o-ring or something. Less than 24 hours after the most hellacious drive I’ve ever been on.
Hard to name only one. When young, always had some kind of piece of crap with neglected maintenance due lack of money.
Or my wife’s car whenever pass more than one month without me taking care of basic stuff.
A 1998 Jeep Wrangler TJ I test drove at a dealer’s lot out of sheer curiosity. That thing was in decent shape, but it what I’d guess is a 5” lift on it and whoever installed it made to efforts to correct the geometry or replace worn out suspension components. I’ve driven a lot of cars, many of them shit boxes, but none so terrifying as this one. I actually called and put my phone on speaker to tell my wife where I was in case something happened, but more so to share with her how hilariously awful it was to drive. It was like driving a car in which the suspension was made of soggy toothpicks connected to marshmallows left out in the rain. I’m just glad to be alive today.