Horrible Cars You Had To Drive

I got a new car and this one is actually new!

Sadly it's a 2008 Ford Escape. Gladly I didn't pay a damn dime for it. It's a company car for my new job. I've been driving it for about two days and here are my impressions.

It is too light, aerodynamically retarded, and anemic. It's fine for tooling around town. The steering is light, it's comfortable, and the interior is decent for the price. However, turn on the A/C and the engine strains to do anything. Gas mileage is fair but turns to pot with the A/C on. Good thing I don't have to pay for the gas. Here's where it gets bad. Once you take it on the freeway it gets unstable at speeds above 70MPH. It likes to seemingly float and the light steering makes all your input exaggerated. Also, once you get to 80MPH the engine has trouble keeping you at that speed. Even on an extremely slight incline it has to down shift.

All I can say is that it make me appreciate my other two that much more.

So, what horrible cars have you had to drive? What were they and what sucked about them?

1st one would be a 1990 LeSabre with 327,000 miles on it. Oh, did I mentioned it had been wrecked as well? Secondly, every day I have to drive a 1992 Chevy Diesel 1 ton for work that you have to double-clutch unless you want to grind third gear so hard that it will shake your forearm into 50 hairline fractures. Other than that I can't really complain.

I got a new car and this one is actually new!

Sadly it's a 2008 Ford Escape. Gladly I didn't pay a damn dime for it. It's a company car for my new job. I've been driving it for about two days and here are my impressions.

It is too light, aerodynamically retarded, and anemic. It's fine for tooling around town. The steering is light, it's comfortable, and the interior is decent for the price. However, turn on the A/C and the engine strains to do anything. Gas mileage is fair but turns to pot with the A/C on. Good thing I don't have to pay for the gas. Here's where it gets bad. Once you take it on the freeway it gets unstable at speeds above 70MPH. It likes to seemingly float and the light steering makes all your input exaggerated. Also, once you get to 80MPH the engine has trouble keeping you at that speed. Even on an extremely slight incline it has to down shift.

All I can say is that it make me appreciate my other two that much more.

So, what horrible cars have you had to drive? What were they and what sucked about them?
:lol: Your post reminded me of the worst car I had to drive and it was a company car as well, a 1981 Ford Escort. The thing had no heat, even with cardboard placed in front of the grill/radiator, ( and our winters get down to -25 degrees :eek:. The thing was underpowered, and a deathtrap. Everything inside seemed thin and cheaply made. Then the rust started one year and that spelled the end of it eventually. I can't even remember how many miles it had but I know it was well over 100,000.

Your mom... cause she's your mom...

oooo burn..... just kidding, your mom is pretty sweet. Tell her to call me sometime. :D


Umm for me it must of been... a 1995 Ford E250 extended van with a 4.9L I-6 engine. Big, long... under powered. Stupidly easy to drive though, and had some of the best brakes I've ever felt... seriously you could put that thing on it's nose in a hurry.

Then the rust started one year and that spelled the end of it eventually. I can't even remember how many miles it had but I know it was well over 100,000.

Don't give me hope. :grinno:

Your mom... cause she's your mom...

oooo burn..... just kidding, your mom is pretty sweet. Tell her to call me sometime. :D

:lol:

She said to piss off, she's still not talking to you!

My first car, a 1993 Plymouth Laser 1.8 SOHC with a whopping 98 bhp. That thing was ugly and slow as hell.

Don't give me hope. :grinno:



:lol:

Oh yeah, I also remembered it was one of the basic cars I've ever seen. manual with no radio. Almost seemed like a Yugo :lol:

2007 kia rio rental car with do-do brown interior. No power, ugly as sin, embarassing to drive and it smelled of dirty diapers.

i had a early 2000 Ford Taurus rental for a few days. Absouletely horrible. The interior felt too cramped, despite being a normal sized sedan. the acceleration was very uninspiring, getting on the freeway was a chore, it felt as if the engine was really struggling to get up to freeway speed ~70

2000 Toyota Rav4. Slow, couldn't handle, stupid car, no real point for existing.

2004 BMW 325i. Slow as hell, bad miliage, no aftermarket.

2008 Mazdaspeed3. Turned into a rattle trap after two weeks, wrong wheel drive, untunable, aftermarket is basically telling us to piss off, Mazda service sucks ass.

I don't have a very good track record.

1989 Mazda 626 with 167,000 miles on it. 5 speed... the car has MAYBE 100hp, barely gets out of its own way... the shifter vibrates so bad that you honestly think that the car is about to come apart around you. The handling is about as good as a radio flyer.

Plus, it has been totalled. My grandpa, the original owner, hit a damn moose with it in 1997. When you turn on the defrost, glass STILL shoots out at your face.

Safe!

Plus, it has been totalled. My grandpa, the original owner, hit a damn moose with it in 1997. When you turn on the defrost, glass STILL shoots out at your face.

Safe!

I'm not being sarcastic at all. You have no clue how much I would kill to have a car that did that.

2008 Mazdaspeed3. Turned into a rattle trap after two weeks, wrong wheel drive, untunable, aftermarket is basically telling us to piss off, Mazda service sucks ass.

I don't have a very good track record.

i thought you were kidding for awhile about the speed3. i guess not. maybe there is a reason why most of the speed3 guys are moving onto wrx's and sti's.

1994 chevy cavalier sedan 1.6 motor i think it was. thing was slow as hell, and when you turned it had a tremendous amount of body roll. diddnt like it one bit.

i thought you were kidding for awhile about the speed3. i guess not. maybe there is a reason why most of the speed3 guys are moving onto wrx's and sti's.

Eh. The aftermarket is basically all with special companies. Its the whole Direct Injection set up they use. I was expecting it to have really taken off right now, but it hasn't. Cobb's shit is overpriced and overrated (I'm sorry, I got 15ish whp from an intake, I'm not paying 690 bucks for five fucking horsepower just to smooth out the power band), CP-e charges out the ass for everything, and Corksport treats fabrication for this car like its a damned expidition to Zanzibar. It took them three months to get me a mid pipe, which was a two foot long three inch thick piece of stainless steel with a slight bend in it.

The ECU is untunable. Piggybacks don't do anything, you have to constantly change the parameters every few days because the ECU readjusts. The CP-e standback is basically a $700 boost controler. Even the hard flashes don't get any results. When one of the local guys got the Cobb AP, I asked him how it felt. His repsonse was "well, I don't think its all that much faster, just smoother."

The car runs stupid rich. My AFs are sitting in the nines and dipping in the low nines. When I put it on a dyno, the tail pipe sniffer basically bottomed out and stopped reading. It would get great miliage if it wasn't basically dumping fuel the entire time your more than a 1/4 throttle. And speaking of which, the throttle never opens more than 80%. Thats bullshit.

Listen, the Speed3 is a great car for someone who wants a quick, zippy little daily driver, who will do maybe one or two bolt ons, and thats it. Its not a bad car, and really, I paid 25k for it, I wasn't expecting a 7er BMW. I knew it was gonna start to rattle, but this fast? And don't even consider driving it over a dirt road, or even opn a highway where there may be a rock or two...

I bought the car wanting to do to it what I see with all the SRT4s around here without buying an SRT4. I wanted something cheap, marginally reliable, that I could throw maybe a few grand at over the course of a year, and turn into a highway monster. Thats what I wanted. Thats ninety percent of the racing I do, from a 50-60 punch. Problem is, no one company cares enough about Mazda to do it. Mazda makes niche cars, plain and simple. I was hoping that by this time, the market would have jumped all over these things, but it hasn't.

I like the car, don't get me wrong. It gets me to and from work, my girl likes hatchbacks and thinks its nice, the miliage is so-so/decent, its comfy. It handles ok. But really, if you are looking for anything more than a quick DD that you can toss a few bolt ons on and be happy, look elsewhere.

And don't expect Mazda service to give two shits about you. When I worked at the BMW dealership, we would do warranty work on guys who came in with boosted and sprayed 3ers and 5ers. We had one guy come in with a fucked up tranny on his supercharged/nitrous E46 M, and did full work under warranty. I took it to the Mazda dealership the other day to get an airbag spring replaced to get the stupid light to go off. I thought hey, I need an oil and spark plug change, might as well get it done while I'm here. I had my own oil, own filter, and own plugs. $150 bucks in labor. The NTB down the street from my house or the little shade tree mechanic I went don't charge that much for a full 20k mile check up and replacement parts. Hell, the BMW dealership I took my car too before working at a dealership did that shit for free. I had my brakes on that car replaced twice under warrenty. Mazda wants $600 for it.

My problem is two fold. One, I like high reving turbo four and six bangers. The only problem is short of a Poopra, I'm not gonna find a car that satisfies my desires with one of the motors for cheap. Even if I had picked up an E46 M, it would have been a couple grand just to get the car remotely close to what I wanted. As much as I love imports and Japanese and Euro spec cars, none of them (again, short of picking up say, an E92 335i, M5/6, AMG, or Supra) are going to perform the way I want them to with a decent sized and reasonably priced aftermarket with multiple options to satiate my modding desires.

The second is I'm analy type A personality. Things have to be fucking perfect around me, or I do everything I can to make them perfect. In all honesty, unless my car has a prancing horse or raging bull on the hood...I'm not gonna be happy with it. Thats a personal issue, though.

If I had known back in August what I knew now...I woulda sat on the 325i for till mid January, then run to a lot and picked up a high ADS C6 or CUV C6, a CPO E46 M, or sat a bit longer and got a new G8. With the C6 or G8, I could do a few bolt ons, have the power I want, and me screaming, and with a CPO E46 use my contacts at the dealership do get a hell of a build up on the super cheap (like, a car that could destroy a Dinan S2 for less than the cost of a few basic Dinan parts, lol).

Ah well, we live and learn, don't we? Like I said in another thread, my next car is gonna be powerful off the lot, no questions asked. Its gonna be cheap and easy to modify (all things considered), and its gonna be a nice car. No more "toys" for me. Don't get me wrong though, I'm still racing, and I like the essential idea and application behind my car. Its just not what I want, and people who know me know that I equate not what I want with crap. I'll post up the races I've had in the past month or so sooner or later, lol.

I believe that i made a good choice not going with the MS3 now that I hear all of this. I did notice that the aftermarket was crap on those things, and I assumed that it was just taking some time to take off, but it was actually taking a nose dive. I love the speed 3, the DISI system is a good idea, and i dont understand why people arent taking advantage of it. Give it a while, it will happen.

Or we will all be driving Fits...

Another car would have to be my buddy's Pontiac Sunbird... Oh my god. The exhaust sounds like you poured marbles down it, its slow as balls, the inside is literally falling apart, nothing works right. Though I will give it one thing. Its tough as hell. He starts it and doesnt even let it drop in RPMs before he floors it :) we got it stuck on a hill in the back of a local dealership because we tried to climb it... while it was covered in an inch of snow. oops.

I will tell you from personal experience, mazda now compared to mazda from the 80's-mid 90's is more difficult to tune and find aftermarket parts for. An example, the rx-8 has been out for about 5-6 years now (about 7 in japan) and only recently (about a year ago) do we see an explosion in aftermarket support for the car. when the car first came out the only turbo kit availble was the greddy kit, which blew alot of motors, but now we have abou 5-6 different companies offerring their own form of F/I ranging from about 6-7 different turbo kits, 3-4 supercharger kits, and 2-3 nitrous kits, and even more recently support for N/A applications. Some manufacturers just take longer for aftermarket support to come out, and unfortunately mazda is one of them because no company wants to deal with thier picky ECU's.

The ECU in the RX-8 is the saem way as the MS3 so i know how cassies is feeling, the greddy management, blew more motors than it did good for the RX-8, but after about 3 years we got the Racing beat reflash and the Interceptor-X which both were very promissing and did alot for the car, downside was if mazda had a recall to reflash the ecu and you had the racing beat reflash you were screwed and the Interceptor-X always had a check engine light on. But now we have the Cobb Accessport and it has proven to show alot of gains, no checkengine lights, is able to hold different maps so you dont have to worry about losing the maps when mazda does their reflash, and its also the cheapest alternative for the RX-8.

just a thought, has any company done a stand alone for the ms3? what you are telling me cassies is starting to worry me. i have a buddy looking at ms3's, but maybe he wont be anymore if this is the case. geez, i dont even own one and i feel bad about it. this must be the reason why everyone that races is switching to old ecu's or tuning older cars. for instance, there are no ecu upgrades for my generation of sr20 sentra. most guys are wiring up the car with the previous generation ecu in order to tune it.

well, who ever was smart and thought to put a lock on ecu's for tuning only done by the factory was smart by the dealerships, but are loosing ground with car enthusiests.

its not a lock exactly but more of just picky programming, because as i said for my car we now have a very good option (cobb accessport)

back on topic though, worst car i have driven was the HHR my dad rented about 2 weeks ago while his car is being fixed, thing sucks, whoever designed the car should be shot.

just a thought, has any company done a stand alone for the ms3? what you are telling me cassies is starting to worry me. i have a buddy looking at ms3's, but maybe he wont be anymore if this is the case. geez, i dont even own one and i feel bad about it. this must be the reason why everyone that races is switching to old ecu's or tuning older cars. for instance, there are no ecu upgrades for my generation of sr20 sentra. most guys are wiring up the car with the previous generation ecu in order to tune it.

well, who ever was smart and thought to put a lock on ecu's for tuning only done by the factory was smart by the dealerships, but are loosing ground with car enthusiests.

No standalone yet. Just CP-e or XEDE piggy backs, which are just $800 boost controlers, and the overhyped Cobb. The Cobb is $690 now, and street tuner and pro tuner software wont be out for a while. The CP-e and XEDE are expensive on their own, and to get the PnP kit is an extra 500 or 600 I believe.

back on topic though, worst car i have driven was the HHR my dad rented about 2 weeks ago while his car is being fixed, thing sucks, whoever designed the car should be shot.

my thoughts exactly. Then they go and make an SS model thats faster than me, just to insult people. You can get the LNF in a Chevrolet platoform, but that catch is they put it in a fucking VAN.

96 dodge grand caravan - first car, soccer mom style ftw

95 Saturn SL2 - By the time it stopped functioning I believe 20-30 things had broken on it.

Just to update everyone I had to drive the pile of shit to St. George today. There wasn't a hill I hit that I didn't have to take it out of over drive on. In fact, at least 80% of the time I had to leave it out of over drive to maintain speed.

I miss my Stealth.....

worse car i ever drove was my moms old audi 5000. car was a piece of crap after a few years. it did however maintain a trip from seattle to arkansas and back

Just to update everyone I had to drive the pile of shit to St. George today. There wasn't a hill I hit that I didn't have to take it out of over drive on. In fact, at least 80% of the time I had to leave it out of over drive to maintain speed.

I miss my Stealth.....

Do you hate it so much that you would switch back to the stealth?

Just a thought!

No, I'd buy something with enough balls to get to sixty in under nine and not down shift to go up hills and drive it. I refuse to put 1,300 miles a week on the Stealth but this think is so pathetic that I need to drive the Stealth once in a while to keep me sane.

thats what the GTC is for. :D

Actually, thinking back....

My wife and I did own a 2000 Dodge Neon for a couple of years. The thing was gutless and only had 3 gears. Granted the interior was nice, the car was a pile of crap.

I had 2 rental cars that were a joke. A Malibu and a Corolla. Hated them both but that was all the insurance companies would pay for...

My Trans Am.

^ lol....

Yeah, hybrids are pretty much trash to drive. No get-up-n-go.

thats what the GTC is for. :D

To sit in my drive way uninsured and unregistered. :lol:

Perfect. you drive the thing like a crazy person, you have nothing to lose. Hit as many people as you can, jump the thing off curbs and other cars, and when she finally dies, ditch her and walk away peacefully and content with yourself.



And buy a new(to you) GTC....

See, the problem being finding another GTC. However, I'd do that with a K body LeBaron in a heartbeat.

^^^ Can I come! =)

there ya go. Its always been my life's dream to buy a geo metro and go take it down to the desert and take it off the 4 wheeler jumps and flip it a few times. Then when im done drive it into the river.