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.
This is my third time saying so on this site so I won’t go into further detail unless someone asks.
Lambo LM002. It is by far the biggest POS I’ve ever driven, and that’s both in size and in shittiness.
My first summer job was at a place that supplied propane to many of the businesses in my area. The Ford half-ton they used for some things routinely had more than a full ton of 100-lb propane cylinders in the back. And it was not new, with steering more vague than a vascillating politician.
One day I was driving it, and (admittedly, bad idea) looked at the radio. Of course, it changed direction in the middle of a turn. The next thing I knew, I was in the ditch, trying to figure out how to explain myself. I admitted fault, and to his credit, the owner gave me the rest of the week off, and a fresh start on Monday (Thanks Don).
Bottomline, that truck should not have been on the road, and especially not with 2,000 of propane in the bed.
Easy, drove a friend’s Shelby Cobra replica. The thing had a built 460 with aftermarket aluminum heads and a big cam, 5spd. Raw, brutal, dangerous, and unforgiving if you got into the throttle too much. It was fairly drivable when just puttering around as long as you could put up the heat and lack of room. I am 6’5 and defensive tackle wide so smaller folks might have more room. Might be fun at a race track.
That’s easy, a Dodge A100 pickup with a 350 Chev. with probably 400hp, between the seats.
A friend drove it for a while as a daily driver.
It was kinda fun to drive around town, the cab forward position was weird and really entertaining when stopped in a line of traffic and people would glance in their rear view mirror and see a truck in their trunk.
I had it out on the open road and decided to put my foot in it, at about 90 mph it was all I could do to keep it on the rural road it shimmied so bad, I thought I was doomed, going to end up dead in a ditch. I stayed off the drum brakes, and let it coast down.
Upon examination in my friends driveway, we discovered that at some time in its past somebody had brazed up a crack in the frame and painted it over, the crack was now full height. We assumed that combined with the beam axle had caused the terror.
I’ve been in many motorsport incidents over the years they are different with no time to be scared, but that truck was pure horror.
Swapped a WRX drivetrain into a 1986 Subaru XT, and barely got it working during a lemons race. I’m the first driver out there and first impressions are “Holy shit this thing is FAST”. Second impressions were “OH SHIT, the brakes don’t work!”. Figured out during that lap that the WRX has a check valve built in to the booster to prevent the turbo from pressurizing the booster, and the XT had the check valve in the manifold. For about 3 seconds after releasing the throttle, you had anti-powered brakes as you’re not only fighting the brakes but also the pressurized booster, and then it suddenly switches to overpowered brakes once it starts building a vacuum.
I call myself Muad’Dib to avoid the mind killer.
The worst car was a badly maintained 86 Chevette. Metal on Metal brakes, bald cracking tires, bio hazard interior, you name it. I was doing someone a favor driving the thing to a different location for the owner to pick up or abandon, not sure which.
I drove a Jeep CJ-5, unmodified, at 55 mph during a decent storm in CA. The Jeep has no sways and is light enough that the wind will determine your lane instead of the steering wheel. I was relieved to make it home alive. I still have the jeep but we don’t take it out for anything over 50 mph.
My best friend used to have a 2002 Honda Civic. She had bought it from a family, where it had been several young drivers’ first car. It only had 109k on it when she got it, but that thing was rough. No ac, front bumper almost dragging the ground, no back bumper. Some control arm bushings failed after she’d owned it for a couple years, and you could hear the control arms rattling on the subframe. They had actually worn a groove somewhere, because on one occasion I was driving it the steering “stuck” for a second mid-corner where something caught. She was incredibly broke and limped it along like that for a year or two, taking back roads everywhere she went. I don’t think she ever drove that car much faster than 40mph (which is what I told her she should do until it got fixed). The head gasket eventually failed and I was there to perform the post-mortum…that it wasn’t worth fixing.
Oh, and my grandfather’s old Mitsubishi Mighty Max got pretty sketchy towards the end of its life. Apart from consuming truly spectacular amounts of oil (and filling the cabin with the smoke since the exhaust pipe was broken off just under the cabin), there were many inches of play in the steering wheel, and the brake pedal sank almost to the floor before finally slowing the truck, with a hard pull to the right. Even in that state it would, in the words of my grandpa, climb a tree. It too, fell victim to a head gasket failure, but still seemed to run just fine despite it, apart from an even more impressive amount of smoke from the tailpipe. Fun story, some of his cows used to know the sound of that truck’s horn, he’d honk it when driving to one of his fields and they’d all line up ready for him. Well, the horn broke. So then he would just throw it in neutral and rev it (no exhaust system remember)…and the cows learned that sound too.
Honorable mention: my ex’s mom had a late 90s…town and country? Voyager? Caravan? Idk because it had such a mismatch of parts all over. Every panel was dented and scratched, none of the wheels or tires matched, and it had the tick of death. Its the only car that sketched me out while turning it around and pulling down a driveway. The entire instrument panel was dead, and the brakes felt like they were connected with sponges. I had the suspicion it was very close to death. And I was correct–it died later that day.
Scary good: friend in Oregon acquired a Triumph GT6 with a Mazda RX-7 engine swap by Rolla Vollstedt (Indy car builder back in the day). It was so light and smooth that it didn’t seem to have a redline (I think it was nominally 7500 RPM) and forward motion from low speed was like “go go gogo gogogogogogogogo” until you ran out of RPMs. The fact that my daily driver at the time had 60hp and that I’d never been on any of the roads we drove made it an almost hallucinogenic experience.
Scary bad: in high school, worked at a summer daycamp where, on a short trip to watch an NFL team at a local pre-season training camp, a counselor used his Chrysler station wagon (“big as a whale”) to carry *23* people (mostly kids aged 5-10). I will say no more in case the statute of limitations extends more than many decades, but I don’t recommend riding in any vehicle where your crumple zones are primarily small children. We did all survive, but after that I never again drove in a packed car (7 people in a Pinto hatchback notwithstanding).
I’ve had 6 in a Triumph GT6+!
A 1969 Chrysler 300 with a 440 and 4-wheel drum brakes that got stuck wide open on a launch from a traffic light on a 2-lane highway. Turning off the ignition resulted in it dieseling so hard it continued to accelerate at 110+mph.
Years ago my then-wife really, really wanted a cool old Jeep (I’m more a VW masochist) so we went and looked at a bunch including a CJ5 that someone had thrown 35s under and crammed a V8 under the hood. Went like a scalded rat… in a straight-ish line. While the owner said it needed a little TLC he neglected to mention steering required a lot of wheel before anything happened. When it finally started turning it wanted to snap around. He also neglected to mention the distinct lack of brakes which led to one of the more major pucker moments of my life.
Needless to say I didn’t take it out of the neighborhood and we crept it back to his house before saying “thanks but no thanks” and getting the hell out of there.
Ferrari F12 with 740 HP. Also one of the best. And an Opel Corsa A, circa 1988. Size of a shoe and when braking, the rear axle moved by almost a yard to the left or right, always a surprise
1996 Nissan Pathfinder. Once the bushings go out in the 5 link rear suspension, they are nowhere near triangulated enough to control the axle. A hard bump on the freeway at any speed over 60 will result in an immediate and unplanned lane change as you attempt to get the vehicle wrestled back under control. The rear end will sway what feels like feet from side to side as it travels up and down in response to the bump. Absolutely terrifying.
My mother in law had an S15 pickup of unknown vintage, every bump it would shift in the lane, if you touched the brakes one wheel would randomly lock up and if they all worked it would pull left or right. If you got onto a gravel road the windows would vibrate down, the tailgate would pop open and it would pop into neutral randomly. She kept taking it to the nice mechanic down the road who proclaimed it absolutely fine, after he died in an accident I went to the sale of his shop and found he had a collection of VW Vin tags with registration for his side business of ‘rebuilding’ wrecks. The thing was American but I felt every trip in it was a Kamikaze mission that I would not return from.
I had a Ranger that if you hit a bump too hard, it would come out of gear (manual) the flip up sunroof would open, and the cassette would eject itself from the tape deck. Tailgate opening only happened a couple times though
Brother from another mother, I had a Lada where the cassette deck wouldn’t eject or turn off or down, Ted Nugent’s greatest hits for 1400km, Wango Tango still makes me ill
My grandfather had an Oldsmobile Aurora. Beautiful car (green/beige) with that subtle V8 sound, but towards the end of his time he was not able to keep up with maintenance. I was asked to take it somewhere, and quickly learned that the shocks were completely blown. Anyone who has experienced this will know that it is a disconcerting feeling to say the least as it leaps and bounds over the slightest bump. Not a fun trip.
Honorable mention (not a car): 50’s Massey-Ferguson tractor forklift-conversion driving on the road between farm sites. Driving that forklift forward at any sort of speed with the steering at the rear was legitimately dangerous (forklifts have come a long way), so we would drive it backward, with the steering at the front. Still, old tractor, sitting sideways, looking over one shoulder and steering with one hand, at probably 12 mph with cars going by at 50. Good times.
I haven’t driven any really horrific cars so peak scary is,approaching 50mph on a bicycle, on I-405. asterisk, this was during the Bridge Pedal in Portland so the road was closed to car traffic and we were on the ramp from the Fremont Bridge
’95 Geo Tracker on the interstate with the speedometer pegged. Like guiding a ping pong ball down a mountainside.
I drove one from Savannah, GA to Tulsa, OK pulling a small trailer and packed to the gills. No cruise control. I wasn’t scared, but my right leg nearly fell off after holding the gas pedal down hour after hour.
Cincinnati OH to Augusta GA, but without the trailer. I can empathize. Almost missed the clutch at the end of an off ramp once.
It’s a toss-up between two of mine after suspension work:
The ’98 Cavalier after I replaced the entire front subframe (along with the control arms), and the ~3 degrees of toe-out it had from doing so, prior to the alignment. Even the smallest steering input above 45 mph led to the car wandering back and forth a terrifying amount. And to get to the dealer where I had it aligned was a combination of 45 and 55mph roads – I held that wheel very straight.
My ’81 Z28 after upgrading all the suspension (upper/lower control arms, lowering springs) and, importantly, all the steering linkage. Was planning to take it to a car show the next day, but after the test drive that night it was quickly decided that hell no.
What I did not know was that the rag joint was shot (when I replaced it later with a U-joint, you could twist it back and forth by hand, easily), and at about 40 mph with an eyeball alignment of the tie rods (with a degree or two of toe-out, it turned out), I was literally turning the wheel back and forth about 90 degrees each way to drive in a straight line on a non-bumpy straight road.
It was absolutely horrifying.
I owned a ’97 conversion Econoline with the 4.6l Triton in high school. (This isn’t about the van, but that does hopefully tell some of my driving experience to that point.)
It was a private high school, and for winning a fundraiser, I got to be “Principal for the Day”. I did something I had always wanted to do: drive the school’s maintenance ’97 F-350 dump truck with the 7.3l PowerStroke.
It was just 3 laps around the school, but at one point one of my friends in the bed of the truck (none of the faculty stopped me) was screaming “IT’S A TRUCK! IT’S NOT A CAR” in reference to how I was taking the turns.
Did I also mention it had a plow and ash spreader on it at the time? I felt like a god.
Anyway, nothing bad actually happened during the drive…although a cop passed by just after I put it in park and he left a message with the office telling them not to drive with people on the bed. (The vice principal gave me one of the most dagger-shooting looks I’ve ever seen.)
The superintendent also told me there was a nice puddle under it, from the brake lines (I didn’t know it didn’t have ABS). I apologized profusely, although he later told me not to worry about it–“they were on the way out anyway.” I just “sped it along”.
That incident manages to ride the line between hilarious and terrifying in retrospect.
But the sound of that engine still tempts me to this day. Forget your Ferrari engine sounds, just give me the 7.3l PowerStroke.
Scariest? Probably the stretch limo. Like piloting a ship in heavy seas, complete with similar turning circle. I’d never driven anything so long, so I took it really easy.
The terrifying part was when I started it. I hit the key, and loud yelling came from the back seat where the last passengers had left the TV on. About had a code brown.
Same. Stretched Hummer that didn’t want to stop in snow. Loaded with a bachelorette party and nearly rear-ended someone else.
Scariest for the passengers: I was 10 years old driving 60s Willys paddy wagon (balloon tires) on a beach in Mexico. This is a huge wide beach at low tide. In the middle the was a derelict fishing boat. I came within feet of hitting it at speed. Everyone was screaming!!
I somehow forgot that my first car, the 1989 Geo Prism LSi, which had David Tracy levels of rust, would sometimes stall on left hand turns if there was less than 1/4 tank in it. I couldn’t fill the tank past 3/4, otherwise the interior reeked of gasoline, so I always had to keep it in the middle half of the tank volume.
On a few occasions the car sputtered to a halt in the middle of a major intersection. Not ideal.
But at that age I had less fear for such things. The box truck somehow scared me more, but I think it was just because I felt like there was more to lose 5 years later.
I had a ’72 Cutlass that I paid $250 for. It’s the only car I’ve ever owned that lit up all three idiot lights at the same time- oil, temp, alt.
At the time I had a messenger service gig and was driving all over Chicagoland. One day I’m coming out of downtown on the Kennedy, and right in Hubbard’s Cave the Cutlass drops a left tie rod. I got it coat-hangered together and made it home, but even after I replaced the tie rod end I never felt quite right in that car.
I used to live there, and for those who don’t know, this is no ordinary expressway and especially area in which to break down. Well played indeed – that’s some serious MacGyvering in a very real ticking timebomb, er, rear-end situation.
Yeah, I learned that well from watching Adventures in Babysitting
Also: “A mall? Where do you think we are, Boise, Idaho?”
A few friends in college had cars with structural carpet if you catch my drift,
Using a very loose definition of drive was piloting a 1G Eclipse with no engine about 20 miles being flat towed with a chain behind a Silverado. Every time we slowed down I had to push the brake pedal with both feet while holding down the button on the e-brake and pulling it with both hands so I didn’t slam the rear bumper. We had at least one instance of being cutoff where I couldn’t have been more than a few inches off the bumper.
Actually drove under the vehicle’s own power was a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo with a homemade garbage lift kit that introduced extreme death wobble which I had raise its’ ugly head multiple times while driving.