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Best place: probably 10 years or so ago, my ’97 Grand Cherokee’s water pump failed catastrophically on Highway 64 near Nashville, NC. I was able to pull over quickly, multiple coworkers saw what happened (no worries about making excuses for my lateness!), and the area was heavily patrolled by Nash County Sheriffs at the time, so I had a sheriff’s deputy sitting with me until everything was resolved. Bonus: the first thing happening at work that morning was an annual safety meeting that always runs for at least 45 minutes, but more often an hour. It ran so long on that particular day that, by the time I scheduled a tow truck, contacted a mechanic, and arranged for alternative transportation for myself, I ended up only missing about 15 minutes of actual work time.
Worst place: somewhere near Arundel, Maine on New Year’s Day, I think 1998 or ’99. Dad’s 1990 Suburban suddenly overheated. Most places were closed, but we managed to find one shop that was open. The tow truck they sent had a standard cab, so all of us had to cram in there (the driver apologized profusely to Mom every time he rubbed against her while shifting gears), and the poor dog had to stay in the Suburban while it was being towed. The shop was nice enough to let us bring the dog into their waiting area though. The diagnosis: it was a bitterly cold day, and the wind chill had caused the thermostat to malfunction. Mmm-hmm. They did get us back on the road, and the Suburban made it all the way back to North Carolina, but would ultimately lose its engine due to the amount of damage (if I remember correctly, the head had cracked).
Best place: I was driving home from college in Eastern Washington in the late 80s when the generator in my 1971 Type III Squareback started failing. My destination was just West of NW Portland, and I managed to make it to a parking spot in NW Portland, about 15 yards from a pay phone before the battery finally gave up the ghost.
Worst place: water pump impeller failure in an E30 325eS on Hwy 99 in Seattle, where there were no shoulders / no turnoffs. Had to nurse the car along for a couple of miles while the temperature skyrocketed, and the accessory belts shredded themselves (screaming all the way) before I found a place in a pretty sketchy neighborhood where I could pull over and call a tow truck. Thankfully, there was no permanent damage to the engine, just to my wallet.
Best place – I had a 1990 Citroen BX with the hydraulic system with the pressurised spheres that were used for both suspension and brakes.
Just as I was exiting the motorway, all four corners of the car slumped down to the bump-stops and as i was assessing the situation, the roundabout at the end of the exit road was fast approaching. It was a big multi-lane roundabout controlled by traffic lights.
As i’d been travelling at about 70mph and had to slow down enough to be able to stop for the lights, i pressed the brake pedal only to find it was brick hard and provided almost no braking power.
Starting to panic as i managed to scrub off a bit of speed 50 metres out, then the lights went green, and then magically turned green for me all the way around the roundabout to the third exit, 200 metres beyond which was luckily a Citroen Dealer.
I managed to get there without having to brake hard or come to a full stop. It was a Sunday, so the dealer was closed, so i parked it up outside the workshop, left the key on top of a tyre and got my mum to pick me up.
Phoned them the next day and got them to fix it, no tows or breakdown service necessary!
Oh, I just thought of a better one…
In 2004, we (me + girlfriend) were travelling through Spain in a 1992 Rover Mini. Heading north towards Madrid with the intent of going to Salamanca.
We were on the motorway when we noticed oil running up the bonnet. Pulled over at the next town (Aranjuez) and stopped at a petrol station and stared at the engine for a bit trying to figure out where the oil had come from.
Then a local walks up and asks if we’re having problems and tells us that her mechanic is nearby and also “has a Rover”. She offers to show us the way.
Me, being very trusting of pretty young Spanish girls, was more than happy to follow her. My girlfriend (now my wife) was less enthusiastic.
My only concern was that this “has a Rover” could mean the guy has a Rover 600 or some other modern Honda-derived Rover as opposed to a Mini.
Anyway, we follow her a few streets away and in the workshop there’s a 1960s Mini up on the hoist and the girl speaks to the mechanic for a minute and he takes a look, fixes the leak, tops us up with oil and send us on our way without wanting to take any payment at all.
In the meantime, the girl has asked us about where we were heading and we told her Salamanca. She told us to skip Salamanca and go to Segovia instead, which we did and found it to be a wonderful town, so we got a repair and excellent travel advice for free!
My very first ‘breakdown’ was August 16, 1977. Like Churchill said ‘a day that will live in infamy’.
Most don’t remember that’s the day Elvis died. And the day I ran out of gas in my 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 LTD Convertible. This was a one-off car my grandfather bought from an uncle who worked for Ford his entire life.
It was the suicide-door version of a 65 LTD convertible(which did not exist). Tank green. Green silk-like seats with room for 200 friends. 534 cubic inch truck engine.
We were headed up Cochran Road in Smyrna, GA when the news broke that Elvis Presley was dead around 3PM.
Like everyone…we coasted to a stop…and didn’t realize until we tried to move that my massive tank decided to run out of 50¢/gallon gas.
I managed to man-handle the beast down-hill into a driveway and we hiked to buy a gallon of gas (in a complimentary can).
Those were the days my friend.
Summer 2020. Beginning of the pandemic. Hubby in Miami (Red Cross).
Living in Manhattan we don’t own a car. Because why?
Decided to decamp to friends in Texas so rented a Kia Optima (nice) from Hertz.
About halfway between New Orleans and Houston on I-12 the right rear tire blew out. In a construction zone. With Jersey barriers on the left shoulder. 2:26 PM
Pulled as far to the right as possible without going into a swamp I got out and opened the boot to pull out the spare tire. Which is where I found the owner’s manual. And nothing else. Well shite!!
Called Hertz. ???????????????????? 20 minutes of music then CS rep comes on.
Long story short: tow truck shows up at 9:33PM.
7 hours on the side of I-12 and finally delivered a micro-car that reeked of cigarette smoke (I’m allergic). So, a 2-hour drive to our friends north of Houston with the windows down and a cat (did I forget to mention the cat?!) en flagrante very unhappy about 60 mph winds in 80°F weather.
Plus, (PLUS! PLUS! PLUS!) I got a $1200 charge on my card about 6 months later for a (1) $75 tire and $1125 ‘tow’.
Not really broken down, but in 2009, my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I were on our way back home to western Kentucky from a trip to Oklahoma to see her aunt and uncle. It was the year after we graduated high school, so 19-year-old us felt really grown up taking her 2006 Chevy Malibu that her grandma bought on a multi-state road trip.
This was at the beginning of smartphones, and we didn’t have them, so we were using a TomTom (remember those?) to navigate. It took us through East St. Louis on the way home, and the Malibu decided to ding and illuminate its low fuel light in one of the worst neighborhoods I’d ever seen.
I stopped and put $5.00 in while the cashier stared incredulously at me for even getting out of the car at all. We scurried back onto the main highway and on into Illinois before finding another gas station.
The second best spot I broke down was in the Walmart pickup parking lot. I had the rear hatch on my wife’s Highlander open too long with an old battery and it refused to start after getting my groceries loaded up. There was an NTB in the same lot, and I knew what was wrong so I grabbed a couple cheapo tools at Walmart, then bought a battery at NTB and changed it out in the parking lot in about 10 min. When I brought the core back, the NTB manager asked me if I wanted a job lol.
Best: My truck’s transmission wiring decided to go out while it was parked in my barn where I work on all my cars these days.
Worst: Technically I wasn’t present for this, but I was stranded by it so I’m counting it. My Mom and Grandma had a flat while out on some random fire road in the Bighorn mountains. Not a problem, right? They had a full-size spare so it should be fine. Except neither of them could get the lug nuts broken loose. My connection to this is that they were supposed to come pick us up after fishing and were not there when we got done because they were stuck in this field.
Fortunately, some guys who may have been illegally cutting wood back on this road happened to come by while they were struggling to change the tire and were able to get it done.
Mind you, this is in a super remote area with no cell service for dozens of miles in any direction, so if you can’t get your vehicle moving again you have a looooong walk to help. It was miles to the nearest semi-major road for either of us.
Worst place was on hwy 59 outside of Streamwood, IL. I had just finished jetting/syncing the carbs on my ‘76 XS650 at a friends house when the nut holding the timing advance rod came off. I thought I was WAY closer than I was to my buddy’s house, so decided to just push it back. An hour later after pushing it on a 45 mph road with a big ass curb and no shoulder, a cop stops me and tells me I can’t be doing that and people had complained (again no one offering to help). He told me to just leave it on the road and I told him no f*ing way. “OK, but get it off the road as soon as you can.” I replied “no kidding!” That is the only time I have ever mouthed off to a cop. He was such a dick, and I wasn’t leaving my beloved motorcycle in the middle of the street.
Second Worst was the south side of Chicago after work. My Grand Cherokee’s front wheel fell off (ball joint failed), and I was in the middle of making a turn. While waiting for the tow truck, several people slowed down to laugh at me and a couple guys offered to fix it with their welder. The tow truck driver damn near got run over figuring out how to get my 3-wheeled Jeep on his truck. Then the dealer he dropped it at misplaced the damn car for 2 days! I was like “it’s a big green jeep with a missing wheel! How do you lose that?!” I had several other issues with that goofy thing and traded it in a few months later still paying off repairs after I sold it.
Worst place was going up Mackenzie Pass in Oregon, on a section aptly called Deadhorse Grade. It was there, on one of the hottest days during the 2021 Northwest Heat Dome event, that my Mercedes R320 serpentine belt tensioner pulley decided to lock up. Serp belt was shredded, but we still needed to continue climbing to pull over safely. Finally made it to a spot to pull off the road, with coolant and steam everywhere from an overheated engine and ruptured expansion tank.
There was no cell service, but luckily some wonderful people stopped and called a tow for us (using my AAA account) when they got into range further east. But we had no way of knowing whether the call was made, or when a tow truck would arrive! We waited in the intense heat and fading evening light for over 8 hours on that hill until we heard the rumble of diesel tow truck winding up the grade. It was almost midnight by that time, and we had set up to camp for the night, as we were planning to hitchhike out the following morning. So we packed back up and got back home via the tow driver, but it was quite a memorable trip and breakdown. Highly recommend AAA premier and their 200 mile tow range if you own an old car, or unreliable modern car.
Worst? Probably I-225 in Aurora, CO during morning rush. Serpentine belt in my Mini failed. Best/most convenient was probably when the thermostat failed on my 1966 Plymouth Sport Fury in front of my friend’s house after we got back from our outing.
Best place – My 2009 Kawasaki Versys 650 on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Western NC on a lovely 75 degree day, managed to pull over to an overlook spot. It was a long wait for the tow truck but hard to beat the view
Best place, though not technically a breakdown: The water pump on my 1978 BMW 530i started weeping in my garage the very first time I started the car *after* a 3200-mile road trip to get it home.
Best place, but for the experience: On the shoulder of 90/94 on the north side of Chicago, a couple miles from home, in 2010, when the alternator in my G20 failed. This was after the second or third date with a wonderful woman; she had asked me to let her know when I got home, and I let her know what had happened. She drove in from the suburbs and used her AAA to get me a tow. Before the legit tow driver showed up, someone else showed up pretending to be him and winched my car up. When we realized this was about to turn into one of those hold-your-car-until-you-pay-us situations, she used her journalist background to successfully intimidate him into believing that official trouble would arrive if he did that, and he dropped it off on my street. She then helped me push it around the corner into the alley and garage, saying “It’s OK, we did this all the time in Poland”. We still laugh about this.
Before we figured out that the 411 fouls plugs REGULARLY with its current trash carb setup, man, every off-noise used to set me worrying. I, stubborn goofball, decided to try and ironman it through the Lemons Rally I’d signed up for where it was…almost ready. I was convinced I had a bad wheel bearing somehow because of one mystery noise, so when I got cell service back in Eldorado, TX — the absolute middle of nowhere — concerned friends at home routed me to a Love’s in Sonora that would probably have the bearing grease to redo it.
That Love’s was up a STEEP hill along I-10, I had a car running with fewer than all its cylinders and another problem brewing in the background that I wouldn’t know about until we dropped the transmission again. (FORESHADOWING!) Needless to say, with crappy taillights, a tractor “slow” triangle that works way, way less in total central-southwest-Texas darkness, and no real route around it, I took on the longest freeway hill climb of my life. Ugh. That’s the worst. That right there.
Believe it or not, State Farm towed for a grand total of $0 it to the nightly hotel in Alpine because it was roughly in-range for their tow-to-a-shop coverage (209 milesish per Google, but ultimately more since the tow truck driver got lost and missed his turn-off from I-10) and I planned to meet up with other Lemons Rally folks there to check into it. The wheel bearing seemed…fine enough to keep going when we looked at it in the morning, and we ultimately didn’t mess with it.
What wasn’t fine was the transmission. Turns out, we somehow forgot a piece of painter’s tape that we stuck on to protect an input shaft, so it’d been circulating bits of tape in the transmission fluid this whole time. Fortunately, I was now convoying with another crazy Lemons person, so I finally coasted into a gas station in Sanderson, left it there, and ended up making a 16-hour round trip with another friend with a trailer to go fetch it. The gas station was thankfully cool with me leaving it right next to the door under full lights, and no one messed with my poor, sad garbage car son.
So, uh, shake down your crudbuckets better and take more time when you fix them. Also, I’m a moron, but I’m a stubborn moron and you’re not gonna tell me what to do.
Ohhh! Both in my 2011 Grand Cherokee, both times with similar issues.
TLDR; I went offroading and hit a muddy area too hard. Ended up bending the radiator and plugging it up pretty badly. It was “fixed” (read as: pressure washed out, but that was it) by a mechanic.
Worst place: An onramp to I-495 on the DC Beltway. For those of you that don’t know, the Betlway is a monstrosity of 6-10 lanes at times that circles our Nation’s Capital. Its a nightmare. You have Maryland drivers trying to get everywhere as soon as possible, DC drivers that don’t drive a lot but sometimes think they’re in Mad Max, and Virginia drivers who are entitled to owning at least 2 lanes at all times in their uber-lux SUV that can fit a small village in (bonus points when they’re driving it alone and using their cell phones). Anyway! About a month after said offroading trip, my wife and I were going to look at, and possibly buy a new car for her. We were about to get on 495 off of another busy road and I saw the temp spiking. Like from 219 to 240 in seconds. I pulled over ASAP and as soon as I got out I knew. Popped the hood, and the tank at the lower hose was broken. It was already getting dark so I had to call a tow truck. My wife called a friend to pick her up and for the next 5 hours I sat on the side of this sketchy little onramp with cars passing me thinking they were qualifying for Monaco. 0/10 Do not recommend.
Best place: A middle school parking lot that was closed for Spring Break. I was going through a neighborhood and started noticing steam coming out from under the front edge of the hood with the temp spiking again. I found the empty school parking lot, pulled in, and found that my upper radiator hose had….inexplicably fallen off the radiator. Easy peasy. Uber’d home, got my tools and some coolant. Went back, put it all back together after work, bled the system, and was home before it was dark. 11/10 Do recommend
It’s great being in a large family SUV on that highway. We nearly got killed in an accident by a riced-up Ford Focus. The guy gave us the middle finger for honking after he missed us by INCHES, in front of us. I bet he was going 80+ MPH on the on-ramp, and he wasn’t slowing down anytime soon. It was at night on a 2 lane ramp from one highway to the next. We were in a white large SUV with all the lights on, plus the street lights, so we knew he saw us and did give a crap whether we lived or died. So that vacation was fun (our Outer Banks vacation got cut short by a hurricane and we were returning home).
We’re from the land of pencils, and we get to see Maine and Virginia drivers sometimes on the highways. So highway trips at home can be fun too.
In the middle of a road in a storm with near-zero visibility in my B5 1.8T. I went through a deep puddle I couldn’t see through the deluge and water filled my intercooler, choking my engine. I didn’t dare exit the car, as SUV’s were careening by, swerving at the last second. All I could do was hop the console to the passenger seat since the left side was more likely to be struck as they swerved.
Thankfully, the rain eased up soon and visibility was restored so I could push the car to a side road and get to work fixing it. A passer-by helped me push it up the mild incline and I called a friend who brought jumper cables and tools, we unplugged my boost pipe from the intake manifold and the car finally turned over, naturally aspirated on unmetered air.
I revved it to spool the turbo and purge the intercooler of water, but I needed the engine to be under load to build boost, so I had to actually drive around with the boost pipe unplugged. The turbo was louder than ever shooting air straight out of the intercooler, and the engine made lots of pops and bangs as the MAF read the insane amount of air going through the turbo and dumped in all the fuel it could into the engine, causing it to run super rich as none of that air was actually getting pushed in. It’s the slowest my already quite slow car had ever been, but also the loudest. “This is what it’s like to ride a Harley”, I thought.
In the end, all was well, the intercooler acted as a sort of P-trap and stopped me from hydrolocking. But boy, was it sketchy seeing headlights appear from the fog behind me at speed pair after pair.
When I was 11 I did a motorcycle trip with my dad on his ’79 Goldwing. It broke down at the customs office on the Canadian border along the North Shore of Lake Superior.
A trucker hauling logs gave us a ride from the border to Two Harbors (about 4 hours). No vaccancy in any hotel though, so we ended up staying a few nights with an old lady who would take in stranded travelers in what used to be a boarding house. My mom was able to come pick us up and then my brother and my dad repeated the trip in a borrowed Toyota Truck to pick up the Goldwing. He got it fixed and probably had another decade of adventures with it.
Kinda the best bad luck. We were 7 or 8 hours from home and in a pretty remote area, but the customs office was a manditory stop meaning potential rides were easier to come by. Makes for a good story too!
I’ve broken down 4 times, by my count. Only one was particularly sketchy…a flat tire on only a teense more than a car-width side of a highway next to a steep, grassy (up)hill.
This was around 1AM, in pouring rain, and I didn’t feel like putting on the donut and driving the remaining ~70 miles of highway to get home at 55 mph instead of 68, so I waited 4 hours for AAA to show up, drop me at home, and drop the car at the dealership for the tire to get replaced under warranty.
At any rate, I partially credit my LED flasher replacements with keeping me alive that night.
My 15-year-old e90 BMW left me stranded trying to cross rush hour traffic to turn into my own street. Stopped to yield to oncoming traffic and when it was clear to turn, nothing. Held up traffic for 5 minutes before someone helped me push the car out of the way. Turned out to be a rotted out chassis grounding cable.
Neither of my Audi’s has ever left me stranded. Neither did either of our Cadillacs. For all the shit VAG cars get around here, the only car to ever leave me high and dry was my ’18 Giulia, and it did that three times. Starter relay in a Home Depot parking lot, and brake problems twice, but it couldn’t have been in a better place because I didn’t make it out of my garage, so they towed it back to the ex-Saturn dealer it came from and kept it for over a month while they got advice from Italy on how to fix my Italian Chrysler. They finally sent the instructions for calibrating the Continental brake by wire system (kind of brake by wire), and they were all in Italian. The Floridian mechanics couldn’t read Italian, which meant further delays.
Edit: The S5 did leave me stranded once, but again at home and through no fault of its own. Someone was in there previous to me and either reused torque to yield bolts, or overtorqued them, causing some of the A/C compressor bolts to break and others to just back out completely. A/C compressor fell off the block and threw the alternator belt. I got many faults before leaving my garage, so another great place to have a failure. Having to do rework because of a shitty mechanic shouldn’t count against the car, though.
I’ve only been stranded in my B5 A4 twice, and both occasions were my fault. Once I cracked the oil pan on a rock in the middle of my in-law’s rutted out trail of a driveway, and the other time I narrowly escaped hydrolocking as a deceptively deep puddle filled my intercooler and stopped all air to the engine. Only the oil pan required a tow. Overall, it was a sturdy little car, albeit slow and rusty.
Best place: I noticed my GMC Envoy voltage meter dropping slowly, I was a few miles from home. I was blaming GM electrical weird issues until I noticed the lights on the dashboard started to dim. I turned off everything I could that demanded power (lights, radio, ac). Right before pulling into my driveway the car just died, I had enough momentum to park on the street outside my house. The next day I called AAA and got the car towed to get the alternator replaced.
Worst place: When my car wheels got stolen in the East side of Detroit. Nothing else to say lol
I had a 2001 BMW e46. I was driving home, and the belts started making weird squealing noises. I was like a mile from home. I had my very young daughter in the back seat. I was like “please make it home… please make it home.”
And I did. I pulled in the driveway, and hell immediately broke loose. The pulley came off my belt tensioner and took out the coolant tank and a bunch of other stuff. I said “Oh crap! How am I going to take my daughter to school and get to work?” But that very same day, the Covid-19 lockdowns started. Schools were closed so my daughter was home, and I got to work from home. And I had many, many weeks to fix the car at my leisure.
Worst: US Route 4 in Vermont between Pico and Killington at 1am in the middle of January. I actually got lucky with the weather (20 degrees and not snowing was positively beautiful weather for the middle of the night in Vermont at 2000ft) and sort of lucky that I was just within range of having a AAA tow me all the way back home. Took a long-ass time though.
Friendly PSA – Always keep some serious warm clothing in your car tucked away somewhere when driving in the winter. Especially if you’re driving through the middle of nowhere at night.
Best: I don’t understand the question.
Worst: Riding around the back roads near Lake Wylie in my CJ5 late one night. Pulled down a rutted dirt road for a pit stop and bogged down to the chassis. This was early 70’s so no phones, nothing open. Walked nearly 10 miles carrying (and drinking) a twelve-pack before we found a pay phone. When I returned the next day, the top and battery were gone. Thankfully, they couldn’t get the wheels cause they were buried.
Best: Starter went out on an old Winnebago in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly on Edisto Island. It was Friday evening and we had just arrived. Couldn’t get a starter until Monday. Fortunately, I had parked at the back of the parking lot and the store manager was cool with it. We were right across the road from the campground and beach and there was a liquor store right next to the Pig. The money I saved on the camping spot paid for the starter.