Friday the 13th : What is the unluckiest car you've owned?

Renault 16 - cooling problem, needed a new engine, then sold it.

Anything I owned when I was young that got thrashed to within an inch of its life at every opportunity....
The Skoda 130 rapid blowing its head gasket on the way home from buying it was a low point however.
James

My MK5 Golf GTI. The newest car I’ve ever owned…

Bought as a pick me up after a few life dramas. Crashed my beloved MK2 on the way to pick it up.

Oil pump pick up clogged a week later. Random electrical issue where it would put all it’s windows down….when pouring with rain…

1 year later the high pressure fuel pump ate itself and the head. £800, replacement head.

2 months later the bottom end let go and seized. Engine out, clutch and turbo is fecked. All replaced.

1 week later dumped its coolant in spectacular fashion down the motorway after a pipe split.

Cost me £3500k in 3 months that car! Got sick of spannering on it so sold it on!

1983 Alfasud 1350ti. I owned it from, I think mid 98 to the end of 2001. It had been a aroc uk concours winner a few years before I bought it.

I was, I think, something stupid like the 15th owner. I replaced the gearbox, twice. Once after a professional rebuilt the original, and it was worse. Rear panhard rod mount sheared off about 2 months after a mot. Much spinning, but very luckily no contact with others! Front brakes would randomly decide that allowing movement was beyond their capabilities. Lights would not work in the winter unless the car was warm. All sorts of random electrical gremlins.

But I loved it.

I stupidly sold it when I moved back to the USA, the first time, sadly the next owner left it in a field for a while. Should have bought it back when I found out that.

Have since seen it go through various auction houses at least 4 times.

I wouldn't be at all suprised if it was past 30 owners by now. Lovely car but needed love of the right person.

I guess mine is either the unluckiest or luckiest depending on how you see it.

Back when I was in my late teens/early twenties, I decided to buy a Mk1 Cortina estate to go with my Mk1 Cortina saloon (why I'm not sure). The estate was somewhere around Northolt if I remember correctly.

It was a non-runner, rusty, and had been sat in the chap's garden for years (I'll get it fixed up and back on the road in a flash I thought! - oh the optimism of youth). So I roped in my mate with a Mk2 Cavalier SRi which had a tow bar, and borrowed another mates trailer and off we set round the M25 to pick it. Mate with the Cavalier had to be back in Surrey for an evening shift so time was of the essence.

We got there all right, bought the car, loaded it up and set off back round the M25. I should at this point say that the trailer was an old plant trailer, with a timber deck with a sheet steel deck laid over the top - it was massively heavy, and as we found out the brakes didn't work.

As we were around Heathrow, mate who was driving says "its starting to sway a bit, what shall I do?", well there are two choices, speed up or slow down - I advised (in all my infinite experience) to take all your feet off the pedals and gradually slow down. That's what we did, and the swaying got worse and worse until we were crossing all three lanes and the hard shoulder, until eventually the whole thing pirouetted right round and ended up blocking the inside lane and pointing the wrong way up the M25. The Cortina stayed on the trailer and the whole lot stayed upright - how, I have no idea! The only damage was a stone kicked up from the verge and smashed the passenger window of the Cavelier.

So there we were blocking the inside lane of the M25 facing the oncoming traffic. Not much we could do except get out and wait for help (before the days of mobiles). After a while a traffic cop arrived, stopped the traffic and we swung round onto the hard shoulder. He then proceeded to check the car and the trailer thoroughly, and found that the trailer brakes were inoperative. So he gave my mate who was driving a fixed penalty notice (6 points I think), and strongly suggested we take the back roads home rather than use the motorway. God knows what time we got home!

Surprisingly enough the Cortina sat round my mates for several years being scavenged for bits before being sold to a chap from the Isle of Wight and it snapped in half when he winched it onto his trailer!

Lucky/unlucky - you decide! We all walked away

F type Vauxhall Victor. Wipers packed up on the way to a show, heater burst & filled the inside with steam, brakes failed, both rear springs snapped when I had a fat girl in the back, & it tried to run me over.
Remarkably it's still on the road, according to the DVLA.

Pic didn't post.




And then there was this Alfa Romeo F12 Van.

Not really unlucky, but wore out, unreliable, and to be honest a crappy design to begin with.

It needed more more time , money and skill than what I could give it as a young man in my 20's.

So I had to bail on it...





Highlitghts of Alfa Romeo F12 ownership were ( as rare as they were ) a quick round trip from the Netherlands through Northern Italy and back ( from junkyard to junkyard to go parts hunting )

And me transporting my brother and his mates and their instruments to a gig when they had a Punk Band.

But from what I spent on it Vs the distance traveled, it might have been cheaper to take a taxi for those trips...


What I learned from that one was that some cars deserve to be rare.

Had s Vauxhall Firenza, swapped with a mate for a mk2 cortina ( what WAS I thinking!?!) which had the earth shattering 1172cc engine
Oil light wouldn't go out, even when the engine was rebuilt, gearbox meant changing into 4th involved pulling up the front of the drivers seat bolster so you could get it in, chronic misfire was a porous inlet manifold,( guess how long it took to find that out!) it was hit whilst parked by someone who left a note and his number apologising
I rang him up and asked why he hadn't hit it harder
He said he was very sorry and would use a truck the next time
Dashpot with a completely random oil use issue
I even left it on the slope one night of my parents drive, window down and keys in the ignition
It STILL didn’t get nicked
Suddenly one day whilst I was trying to fix the oil light again, someone pulled up and asked if i wanted to sell it
I still have his arm

Proably my senator lowrider, although there’s at least 3 or 4 other contenders.
Pic is terrible, as it’s a photo of a pic on a laptop.



It was a well known car, multiple mag featured.
I bought it off here for a reasonable price. It was a pile of 💩
The air setup was a Ray Ramsey special so leaked like curse word, didn’t have a compressor capable of filling it fast enough again and the wiring set itself on fire at least twice. At the time I owned it he still had it up on his website trumpeting how great it was and was one of the first ‘strut bag’ cars he did. The struts has more silicon sealer than weld on em. The suspension would randomly drop on you, usually at high speed. Kinda funny in a way but not if anyone was following as the shower of sparks went all over their windscreen.

The lpg setup use to randomly backfire/explode for no reason anyone could find. It got to the point where I had spare intake pipes in the car as it kept blowing holes in em, until I figured out there was one hose clip that if you didn’t do it up quite tight it didn’t blow the hose.

My dog was sick in it twice.

A lorry crashed into me on the day I was going to my first date with my mrs. (12 years, we get married next year). He pulled out on me on a dual carriageway, apparently his gearbox malfunctioned or something and dropped into neutral, and he just rolled out in front of me very slowly across both lanes. I put the car though a gap 3” narrower than it between him and the Armco, took off both wing mirrors and did one front wing.

I managed to get into a street race on the a130 with an off-duty copper. He called a squad car on me when he lost, luckily by that point I’d figured something was amiss when he was still following me all the way into Southend, and I just went a drove round the block in a local estate until either he buggered off or the police turned up, which they did. Searched the car and me, couldn’t find anything and then let me go. I then got pulled 11 further times in 8 weeks.

Very nearly wrote it off towing a Monte Carlo lowrider on a home made trailer back from Bristol for a mate. The Monte had 4 pumps, 8 batteries and a full chassis wrap, we found out when we got there it weighed over 3ton on it’s own. We loaded it up anyway and set off back slowly. We found the trailer brakes didn’t work when we got a wag on coming down that long downhill past Swindon on the m4. Couldnt power out of it and spun it across 4 lanes, snapping the straps on the Monte and half loosing it off the trailer. It was sat with its rear bumper on the floor in lane one with the trailer and towbar across lanes 2 and 3. It only stayed on at all cos we’d left the winch on. Managed not to hit anything and get the Monte off and on the hard shoulder (be unhitching the winch and dragging the trailer back and forth with the Senny until the front wheels fell off as well-good job it had hopping springs!) before the police turned up.
Amazingly they let us reload it all on the hard shoulder then followed us to the next services with it and left. Not before telling me my
MOT was up two weeks previously though!
I guess they didn’t want the paperwork for that one.

Nearly killed the same mate doing some late night rural street activities when he spun on the second bend of some Esses we were ‘enjoying’, only for me to follow him round at full opposite lock. I was looking at him out of the driver side window when I came round the corner. Luckily the handbrake was good and I missed his car by less than an inch.

I finally put it out of its misery when I found the entire rear arches and chassis rails were made of filler and newspapers, dated a coupe of months before I bought it.

That’s just the edited highlights for that one. Theres a escort van and a b4 estate that are also very strong contenders.