Every American made car I’ve owned has been a piece of shit constantly falling apart and needing repair and maintenance. I thought that’s just how cars were for a while. Then I started buying Asian and German cars and realized Americans just can’t make a good car.
It’s all in whether management lets the engineers make a good product or pushes for cost reduction above all else. American made Toyotas are just fine.
A similar thing is true with Chinese made goods. Companies that care enough to implement proper process and quality controls can have perfectly adequate quality come out of Chinese factories. It’s just that the companies that were quickest to export production cared more about minimizing every last cost than about quality.
I had an American-made 2001 Honda Civic that didn’t start having significant problems until it was well over 100k miles. Had an American-made 2007 Accord that never had a major issue with 116,000 miles. Now have an American-made 2023 Integra, and I hope it fares the same.
Edit: but our American-made '96 Astro was a total piece of shit.
My dodge durango was the absolute worst. My bmws are amazing.
I had two ford Tauruses and both were gems. However the Chevy Malibu Hatchback I had was garbage.
I had a Pontiac Fiero. It really was terrible in every way but I love that piece of shit. It has been the only car I have owned that appreciated in value. I sold it for almost double what I paid less than a year after I bought it.
98 Volkswagen Jetta. Rampant problems for everyone, not just me. Body molding falls off, window motors fail, water pump fail, wiper motor fail, 3 starters and an alternator, frame problem wearing out at the wheels, and the clear coat peeled.
When my third window motor failed, I drove my pregnant wife and her sister (who were in the car) to a dealer instead of whatever plans we had. I bought a Highlander on the spot and drove home in that. My wife drove that Highlander for 14 years.
I went from one extreme to the other! :)
Not a direct answer, but if you ever get a chance - go walk around a self-serve junkyard. This is where cars go when they finally just aren’t worth fixing anymore. It is eye opening. There are cars that you will still consider ‘new’ that have already given up the ghost (mainly Dodge/Chrysler, Hyundai/Kia, & Nissan). And you can’t help but think - WTF are these cars doing here, aren’t these still for sale at the dealership?
Conversely, there are also cars there so old you hardly recognize them (usually Honda, Toyota, and full size pickups from Ford/GM).
my 2011 toyota camry.
it’s also the best car I’ve ever owned, probably because it’s the only car I’ve ever owned.
I can’t recall the year, but it was a Dodge Aries K-car, to pin down the era. Jesus. It was a replacement for when my 1970 VW Beetle died in an accident. It was not as good as the Beetle, which says a lot.
I did once for a job briefly drive a Chevy Chevette. That might have been worse than the Aries.
My parents bought a Plymouth Reliant K Car. It was so bad that no one in my extended family has ever considered purchasing a Chrysler product since. I don’t understand how Iacocca saving Chrysler with the K car was not prosecuted as fraud on the American people. That thing was a piece of shit. My favorite feature was how the air conditioner had a condensation collection tray that would fill with water as it operated. Then when you stopped the water would slosh out onto the feet of the front passenger. The floor in ours eventually rusted from the AC condensate. (Lived in Houston which is both humid and hot requiring year round AC). It had plenty of other problems too (shitty carb, bad brakes, lots of squeaks and rattles). My parents sold it before I was old enough to drive.
My favorite feature was how the air conditioner had a condensation collection tray that would fill with water as it operated.
That seemed to be a thing for that time period of cars, as I can recall others that did the same thing. How was that better than just a tube to the outside? Why?
Also a feature of cars then, having the vent to recirculate air close from the inside. Why is that a problem? Well, it isn’t until the car is moving fast, and then air pressure from the outside pushes the door open just enough to whistle. Again, was money saved by doing it wrong?
I had one of those that was grandma-owned but the transmission shit the bed within 5k miles. What a pos.
The car I had the most trouble with wasn’t because it was a bad car, but because it kept getting trashed. VW Cabriolet convertible. Bought it when I got my first real job out of school.
One week after driving it off the lot, parked on a busy city street, someone slashed the roof and tore out the stereo. Fixed it all up. Insurance rate went up. Six months later, knife through the roof AND a smashed window. Stereo gone. Switched to a removable, pull-out stereo. Still got broken into.
Had dozens of slashes/smashes. At one point, just left the door locks open. Nothing to take. Someone slept in the back seat (left food wrappers) and pilfered through the ashtray where I kept loose change.
Loved driving it with the top down, but what a pain it was to fix.
2008 Dodge Avenger. Believe it or not, it was that 2008 Dodge Avenger.
I hated every inch of that car. It was big without any of the benefits a car might have from being big. No power at all, pretty bad on gas. Didn’t have a very comfortable road feel or suspension. Every inch of the car was cheap. I drove it for a long time and towards the end, around 100,000 miles, everything in the car felt like it was malfunctioning.
Any dodge
I had a 2006 Ford Taurus that would’ve been stronger if it was built with Legos. Water pump fell off one day - like… just… fell off. The brackets weren’t broken or misshapen or anything like that, it just fell. None of the bolts were loose or unthreaded or anything. I know that doesn’t make sense. I KNOW. It makes even less sense that it happened twice.
There was also some kind of electrical issue that I could never isolate, but it was causing fuses to blow out every couple months, and would burn out the starter about once a year. I had to replace that starter so many times that I stopped needing to refer to my Chilton book for the steps. Sometimes the power steering would just stop working and then start working again with no warning.
lol. Wow.
Without a doubt, that would be the first car I ever owned, a Renault 21 2.0 diesel that was about 12 years old when I bought it in 1999 of thereabouts, for slightly north of € 1000.
It had some rust, but the worst part about it was that it was slow as molasses. It would do 0-100kph in 25 seconds on a good day, with a top speed of 125 on the speedometer. I laughingly called that my highway cruise control 😁
At the same time, I have very fond memories of that car, as it allowed me to visit my then girlfriend (and current wife), and had loads of cargo space. It also handled speed bumps incredibly well, so I didn’t really need to slow down for them. It also helped that I never had any reliability issues with that thing, until it was totaled.
A Mitsubishi Colt I bought from a guy in a scrapyard for £50 because my Allegro had just been stolen and I needed something quick to get to work. He told me it had an MOT and to come back the next day to pick it up (in the days before it was online) He wasn’t there. It was the rustiest POS ever - bits kept falling off, you could see the road in several places through the floor. Engine was good but that was the only thing. In a lifetime of exercising Bangernomics, that was the stand out terrible car.
Most I’ve lost on a car was a more recent Shogun. Bought for £7,500, cost £2000 in repairs then had a lot more pending. Sold for £1400 in less than a year.
Probably my 2008 Suzuki Reno. It’s coolant system was made of such brittle crumbly plastic that it would crack and leak out all the coolant, and I didn’t realize this at first I didn’t know to look for it, so I get off the highway after driving 20 miles just in time for huge plumes of white smoke to be coming out of the front of my car.
I got it fixed only for it to crack again and leak again. And it became this nightmare of whack a mole where I’m constantly adding coolant, constantly checking my temperature gauge, constantly bringing it in to be fixed.
And then the whole engine died on the highway and I had to pull over while driving to my new job.
In 2003 I learned to drive in a 1986 Hyundai Pony. The breaking point was when I got a stop sign on a slight incline and my dad had to get out while I floored it so the car could get moving again.
Not owned personally but my mom’s '99 Fiat Punto I used to drive in high school was awful. 60 drunk donkeys under the hood, 0-60 of eventually, brakes that yanked it to the right if you were too aggressive on them and a battery that went flat in a few days if you didn’t drive the car. It also had the tendency to just keep revving up when in neutral until you either put it in gear and engage the clutch or shut off the engine.
Anyway, I still have fond memories of that car. Going down mountain roads was fun because it was very slow, but super light, so you could just keep the throttle pinned for the most part and the rotted out muffler made it sound like a racecar lmao.
I had an '82 Ford Escort. Those things were notorious for lunching the motor if the timing belt ever broke (which they did every 45,000 miles like clockwork) while you were traveling down the road. The valves would stop in whatever position they were in at that instant, and then the momentum of the car would keep the pistons moving up and down, bashing the piston tops in to whichever valves were unlucky enough to still be open, ruining pretty-much everything. At the same time I owned that car, my best friend owned an '82 Chevy Cavalier. We were constantly one-upping each other over who owned the biggest turd…
To be fair, that’s the expected outcome for any interference engine that loses the timing belt, which is almost all modern engines as far as I know. 45k is a really short lifespan for a timing belt though :/
actually now that I think back it was the water pump that regularly went out at 45k, and it was run by the timing belt. The noise coming from the water pump is what usually alerted me and I was able to replace it and the belt at the same time, which spared me from ever losing the motor. I drove that thing til it had over 160k on it, which was a lot for one of those…
