Some car enthusiasts will keep a car for as long as it lives. I love that idea of using up a vehicle until it’s ready to go to the scrapyard in the sky. Do you want to help reduce consumption? Keep that old hooptie on the road! But some cars will seemingly hang on forever. These cars could have a Christmas tree of warning lights and rust holes large enough to fall through, but somehow, they just keep going even long after you’ve had enough. Which of your cars refused to die, even when you wished they would just die already?
I tend to buy cars that are past their prime, so this is not an issue I run into often. Most of the vehicles I purchase for the Gambler 500 are a bad day from the scrapyard as it is. Then, I rally those vehicles until something seriously expensive breaks.
In 2019, I bought a Ford Festiva and removed its doors and windows. I learned very quickly why that car was parked in a field for a couple of years. Its gas tank had holes you could see through, its brake lines looked like they came from the Titanic, and it took just a little bit of off-roading to reveal a massive rust hole next to a rear axle mounting point.
I decided to keep it until something major broke, which happened just over a month later when the mega crusty brake lines broke as I pulled into camp before a rally.
Most of my Gambler 500 builds go like that. I’d buy a $500 crapbox, take it on a few rallies, then the car would break in a manner that’s not worth repairing. The most surprising failure was probably a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 240D, which went from being a reliable car to a nightmare in a weekend. Over the course of two days, the clutch began failing, the differential blew up, the starter solenoid died, a throttle coupling failed, and just to add insult to injury, the sunroof got stuck open and the cable for the hood latch snapped. I took all of that as a bad omen and got rid of that car while the differential still sort of worked.
The car that refused to die was a 1994 Dodge Grand Caravan. Sheryl and I spent $1,200 on the van (the new $500 nowadays) and then took it on a Gambler 500. The van got stuck every three minutes or so, lost its rear bumper, broke its exhaust, and its gas gauge worked how it wanted to. Oh, and filling the fuel tank was a nightmare because of an issue that caused gas pumps to click every couple of seconds. That van was just generally a miserable experience. But I told myself I would keep driving it because it still ran and drove fine.
Then the van’s power steering line blew, spraying fluid at hot parts, igniting a fire that melted parts in the engine bay and burned up a wiring harness. I wished for that van to burn to the ground. Instead, the burn was partial, leaving me with a half-dead van to tow home from 3 hours away. The van still ran and drive, but, understandably, Sheryl didn’t feel safe in a vehicle that threatened to kill her. So, I had to rent a U-Haul truck and dolly to tow the piece of junk home. It was a 9-hour ordeal to save a car I didn’t even want anymore. I ended up selling the van to a pair of dirt racers.
What stories do you have? Which cars refused to die, even when you perhaps wanted them to?
Company had a beat to hell Chevy Astro that the supervisor offered lunch for a week if we could kill it, sooooo I drove it in 2nd gear at 80 mph for around 80 miles round trip. Didn’t die, although it was smoking like crazy. I suggested we cut the water pump belt, but that never happened. After another 6 months the company donated to someone.
“Which cars refused to die, even when you perhaps wanted them to?”
None. I’ve never had a car die per se. Nor have I wanted any car I had to die as I like to squeeze ALL the life out of any car I own.
The engines in all of them ran when I got rid of them. The issue was either advanced rust which made them unsafe or they got written off by insurance because someone smashed into them and the cost of repairs was way higher than just replacing it with a similar vehicle.
Actually there is one exception to that… the 2000s Saab 9-3 I had. I paid $2500 for it, got 4 years and about 100,000km of use out of it (had 397,000km on it at the end)
While it still ran great (though it developed an intermittent no-start-when-hot issue), I got rid of that because the maintenance and repair costs were rising and at the point I got rid of it, I knew I’d have to spend at least CAD$3000 on maintenance and repairs within 6 months.
So instead, I replaced it with a base model manual 2006 PT Cruiser. Compared to my Saab, it was 6 years newer, had 1/3 of the mileage and only cost $3200. It wasn’t quite as nice as the Saab to drive, but it chopped my maintenance and repair costs in half.
And that PT was a great car… until an idiot went through a red light and right into the side of my PT causing it to get written off.
I had a 1990 Mazda B2600i standard cab 4×4 manual. Rusty, had spent it’s early life dealing with winters near Lake Tahoe. My dad actually was the one who got it cheap, but it eventually became my winter beater when I owned the Mini Cooper because the county decided residential side streets don’t need to be plowed. That thing seemed like it could tackle any driving conditions.
Only time it didn’t start was because I’d killed the battery by leaving the headlights on. We had it from I think 2005-2015. Now having said that, I never wished death upon it. But eventually the wiper motor failed. It’d been sketchy for years, off track, etc. But when total failure happened, rust had really taken it’s hold on it, so we ultimately donated it.
1998 (or was it a 97) Nissan Pathfinder LE 2wd. Bought it from a friend with super low miles. Lots of nifty gadgets for me at the time – heated seats, moonroof, leather, etc. After a couple of Utah winters, I started dreaming of something with AWD/4WD (not to mention a bit more power than the anemic 3.3L SOCH V6 could muster), but it just wasn’t in the budget. In the meantime, that sucker kept racking up the miles – 20+ miles each way to the office & back, several 400+ mile road trips to visit family…all in all, I put over 100k miles on it after purchase – somewhere around 170k total.
The only money I put into it was the addition of an XM receiver, oil changes, tires, and gas. I seldom ever washed it, and it was stored outside year round. Despite all of that, it just wouldn’t die. Sure, things started to fail – one of the rear windows wouldn’t go down, the seats began to crack, an exhaust leak formed – but the damn thing wouldn’t die.
Finally, one fateful day I was driving down the twisty part of the canyon during a snowstorm and hit a patch of black ice. I managed to carom off the concrete barriers on both sides of the road; hood was pushed in, one front wheel was partly tucked under, and coolant was gushing out (the airbags never deployed, which in hindsight was really weird). Even mortally wounded, I was still able to limp it (on 3 wheels) around 1/10th of a mile over to a nearby parking lot to wait for a tow.
As the family wrench, I provide hospice care for any unwanted vehicles and ease their transition to the great junkyard in the sky. Some go quickly and peacefully while others keep kicking and screaming through the night, refusing to die, like my very first one, a 76 Cutlass Supreme.
It was the family car I inherited after finishing school in 1989 with over 200k on the clock. A 13 year old car is the average today but a 70s car wasn’t expected to last much more than 10 years and 100k, especially in the rusty Northeast. Rolling over the odometer was always a big deal and you could proudly claim the car didn’t owe you anything.
This was Mom’s car and she chose the smallest engine option (260 V8) and had the deluxe Ziebart treatment where black tar continued to oozed from body panel seams for years. Between the highly under-stressed V8 and rustproofing, that car refused to die, despite my best efforts.
After awhile it became a steady stream of annoying repair (all typical wear items) but the final straw was a coolant leak on the way to work one morning. I popped the hood to check it out and the hose burst, shooting a stream a coolant at the hood and showering down on my head and back. I didn’t get burned or anything but I was a hot sticky mess.
I fixed the coolant leak but I was done. My Mom gave it to one of her co-op students, a young man from Jordan with a family; the Cutlass was a luxury car to him. I think he drove it for another few years. My Mom got a ride home in it once and said there was a piece of rope across the back seat holding the 2 rear doors closed.
It still may be out there…
My 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity. This car was pretty much indestructible that it took eleven years to finally kill the engine that killed the car. I was really happy to accept $75 from the junkyard owner to have the car towed away to be stripped apart violently by piranhas for parts.
God, my old ’97 conversion Econoline. (I apologize to regular readers/commenters who see me talk about it all the time. You saw my name. You know what you’re in for.)
Every weird and oddball mechanical problem under the sun…but never an engine or transmission problem or unexpected >$1000 repair. It was reliable in the worst way; I was continually hoping something catastrophic would happen, but no. Always unexpected, but approachable problems.
I used a dying 3-year-old catalytic converter that would’ve been $900 to replace as my excuse to get rid of it…but even that was very much a debate. “What if I happen to get four trouble-free months after that replacement? Then it would average out to okay!”
In retrospect, I did luck out because I got my Prius v and sold the van both in December 2019, and a few months later that Prius v would’ve been unobtainium in the used market. But I acknowledge I was lucky with that.
We moved to Puerto Rico at the hight of used car craziness. I paid 1900 for a 1998 Suzuki Baleno/Esteem (depending where you were) that was clearly stolen once. I looked past all the obvious red flags (like windows that didn’t open) because it was a hatch back with character. The moment after we parked it at our house, it refused to start.
That car would go on to torture us for a whole year. It left me stranded more times than I’d like to remember, but it kept coming back. The maddening thing is that the car had luck for mechanics. I found one that was almost a saint, who worked magic each time I brought it to his shop on a flat bed. I think the crappy condition of the car, and the fact I brought my daughter around, made him take pity on us and give us deep discounts on the work. Every time he fixed it, it would come back better. It would drive just better enough to make you dream of the accomplishment of bring back a car from the brink of death. It was like a bad love interest who you think you can change, but actually is destined to disappoint you.
The last straw was when it stranded my family an hour away from home and we had to sit in it as the car sat on the flatbed, riding down the highway. After that my wife never trusted the car again and her parents lent us enough money to buy a car that isn’t crap (2011 Nissan Juke, another character). My guy actually got it working again, but I couldn’t convince her to let us keep it around and I sold it to my friend in need for $400.
I still think about ‘La Misteriosa though.
I’m convinced that any car you love will break to test your loyalty. Inversely, any car you hate will live out of spite forever.
I thoroughly loathe my ’16 Sorento (learned the hard way I don’t like crossovers). Despite high miles it doesn’t skip a beat and will continue to do so out of spite.
Just curious, what don’t you like about it?
I expect SUVs to handle and behave like trucks. As I am accustomed to. Instead crossovers handle like big, shitty cars. It feels like the “I didn’t want to get a minivan” vehicle. I’ll be going back to a truck for my daily eventually. Probably one of the current mid size crop so I can continue to tow my projects around.
Never had a car I couldn’t kill if I wanted unfortunately.
any amc
1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan. I was 19 and I had inherited this car from my grandmother years before. However, I was a cyclist and had no interest in driving. The car sat in my dad’s driveway for ages and he occasionally loaned it to his friends if they had a need.
Anywhere I couldn’t ride my bike, public transit or a ride from a friend was good enough to get by. I hated cars and had no interest in them. But then, after getting kicked out of the college dorms and needing to pay rent, I decided I needed to keep working for a startup I had a summer job with while continuing to half-ass go to art school. It was too far from the city where I wanted to share a house with my hipster friends for me to ride a bike and public transit to the suburbs was impractical. But it was only an hour drive. I had a free car and sort of knew how to drive – just needed a license.
So after failing the driving test at the DMV 3 times, I finally passed it after my mom had the idea to follow a driving test car from a suburban DMV and so we could memorize the test route and perfect it. It was much easier than trying to do things like parallel park in the city. I got the car and license in time to keep working when school started up again in the fall.
The car was a big boat of a thing with a 350. The paint was peeling off and the interior had faded to various non-matching shades of semi-disintegrated plastic and vinyl. It seemed like a fine idea to let my friends spray paint whatever graffiti they liked on it. As the only guy in the city with a car, it was the way to get concerts that were too far or too late to get to by public transit. The car gradually filled with trash. I knew nothing about maintenance and did nothing unless something quit working. I remember taping a quarter over some hole where a plug fell out in order to keep the brakes working.
Somehow it kept on running. It got me to work and back and everywhere else I wanted to go. It looked so terrible a landlord refused to rent to me once until I repainted it with primer from spray cans. At some point though, I took it to an iffy lube type place and they pointed out metal bits in the differential oil and suggested there might be a problem. I had a line on another free car at that point, so I ended up selling it – but as far as I could tell, it was still running fine. Those metal shavings could have been there for years. I put about 50k miles on it with total disregard for its well-being. Perhaps it’s still running today.
Mid 90’s Plymouth Voyager van.
6 cylinder Mitsubishi engine.
Paid 860$ for it ,rusty etc but it wouldn’t die.
Smmoth rider and always started .
My friends all called the creeper van and teased I was giving away candy near the elementary school with it.
i beat that thing like a red headed step child..
I did donuts in reverse one day till the radiator literally exploded ,I got a cheap Chinese radiator from eBay and resurrected it for another probably 10000 miles .
it got so rusty it was really unsafe so we all got drunk and did the brick on the gas pedal to blow it up.
it just bounced off the rev limiter for a beers length of time.
Then we all decided to drain the oil out to see how long it would last with the brick on the gas against the rev limiter.
We were hoping it would throw a rod through the block and catch fire.
Nope.
it just got real loud from rods knocking , but it just all of a sudden seized up with a loud screech.No explosion , no fire ,no dramatic rods blowing through the block,nothing good ,it just plain died.
We all continued to drink though…..
I took the headlight assembles out for someone else’s van and still got 50 bucks from the junkyard.