post the best car you ever had? and the worst

sorry mods delete this if I'm posting to much again. but the other thread made me think of this topic
well id say my best car was a ford exp it wasn't rated great but I drove the hect out of it and it never left me stranded.id say the worst was a Plymouth horizon

ps ive been lucky I never had a lemon don't ever recall being on the side of the road broke down and I kept the pedal to the metal

Best: All original 1966 Mustang with 244,000 miles on it.

Worst: All original 1966 Mustang after it reached 245,000 miles. lol

bykfixer said:

Best: All original 1966 Mustang with 244,000 miles on it.

Worst: All original 1966 Mustang after it reached 245,000 miles. lol

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oh
That's funny! Same car I suspect!?

I think my coolest car was a 1967 Cougar. It had foldaway headlights, and sequential tail-light directionals. A 289 cu in v8 with three on the floor. No A/C. I paid $350 ran it for a year or so and sold it for $425, with a bearing knock @ 89,000 miles. Who knows? It may have been 189,000 miles. The speedometers didn't record 100's of thousands at the time.

The car I enjoyed the most was a 1980 Plymouth Sapporo. It's identical twin was the Dodge Challenger. Not the 1971 Challenger, that I almost bought. If I had one of those... that might very well have been my favorite car.

Leasing a 1995 Ford Taurus was a very humbling experience. Married with kids, middle class American. It didn't take long before I realized WHY it was the best selling vehicle in America! Six passenger, nice sized trunk, decent mileage, and actually handled pretty well! In '96 Ford changed the model design, and in '98 when out lease was up, I intended to buy a new Taurus. Both my wife and I Hated the NEW design. Instead, we bought a Windstar Minivan.

Oh... YES... the Windstar minivan! What a great car/van. Seven passengers, dual air/heat, and multiple speakers. Fold down back seats made carting over-sized stuff around possible, and the seats were more easily removable than in my Aerostar.
IMO, every family should have a minivan as a second car.

The car that I LOVE, is my 1999 Ford Crown Victoria! I bought it new, it has 268,000 miles, and gets 19 MPG city, 25 MPG highway. The largest car on the road. It cruises in the 70's. I have literally emptied the contents of two smaller cars (that were packed to the gills) into my trunk.

The WORST car I ever owned was a 1982 Buick Century. Four cylinder, front wheel drive. IT was terribly under powered, and was noisy.

i will parrot bykfixer's sentiment above. my best and worst car has been my 83' el camino. ive had to put more money into it than any other vehicle ive owned, but at the same time i will never get rid of it either... because el caminos are awesome.

Yeah, same car Poppy. It had sat for a few years before I bought it. Parts n pieces were failing faster than I could keep up with.

I ended up parking the Mustang and watching Mother Nature and Father Time tag team the poor thing back to it's elements.
Dang unfortunate. But I was 22, raising a kid on a low paying wage, keeping up with maintenance on an old house while attending night school.

While it sat under a tree my transportation was a 77 Cutlass with a high performance engine that passed everything but a gas station.
Worst part was when a so called friend was in a jam for a car I sold the Mustang to him for peanuts. After sitting a while the battery died so I threw in an Interstate Mega-Tron.
Sumbeech had another buyer lined up for 10x what I sold it to him for and.... kept the freakin battery.
I was some kinda mad at the guy for a while. But God afflicted the dude with a weird thyroid issue that made his eyes all googly-like.

Now the 67 Cougar story will be told in the campfire thread someday. It was not a happy ending... unless watching it being hauled away to the junkyard constitutes a happy ending for some.

Now my Prelude? Tab, that one is like your el-camino. There have been times I hoped space junk would land on it while I slept, but it aint for sale to anybody.

Probably the worst car for me was a '71 Plymouth Duster. It started out as a good car for a couple of years, easy on gas, then it developed a frequent vapor lock problem, the frame started to rust out and actually broke by the left front wheel, and it began eating starters.

We had a saying for the Duster:

"It dusts everything on the road... until it turns into dust"

I always wanted a duster

Another problem I just remembered from that Duster - as the thing wore out, the driver's side door latch started to fail. It would sometimes fly open when making a right turn.

I bolted a steel bar across the door so it wouldn't open anymore. Had to get in and out of the car from the passenger side after that.

Eventually that car turned into something like this.

Definitely, my 1973 VW Kombi type 4. With the rear seats removed it could fit my last race bike ('77 390 Husqvarna), through the sliding door.

The only thing better was my riding partners '72 VW twin slider panel bus, which could fit 2 bikes at a time.

Best: 2010 Chevy HHR 1LT bought used with 74,982 miles - some minor (but easily & cheaply fixed) hiccups, but great car overall.

Worst: 2001 Hyundai Accent GS bought new - lots of issues due to cheap wiring - stopped running after 72,000 miles. Was a decent car for first 8 years, but started having transmission issues after a year & went slowly down hill from there...

tab665 said:

i will parrot bykfixer's sentiment above. my best and worst car has been my 83' el camino. ive had to put more money into it than any other vehicle ive owned, but at the same time i will never get rid of it either... because el caminos are awesome.

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My room-mate in school had a '71 el camino. They were dubbed "The Cowboy Cadillac" I don't recall him having any issues with it.

Later, another friend had a (about 1980) fifth generation, he bought it new, or almost new, and it seemed that he always had one issue and then another with it. He really liked it and kept it for a number of years, but it was a problem.

The 80's were not the best years for GM... or the other 2 of the big 3 for that matter.

bykfixer said:

The 80's were not the best years for GM... or the other 2 of the big 3 for that matter.

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THAT'S for sure! And the K-car had to be one of the VERY WORST. Seriously, Chrysler engineers probably had to put in some pretty long hours trying to figure out how to build a 2.2 liter engine with only 84HP (which felt more like 60).

Best: 1992 Mazda MX-3. That little car got me around for nearly 14 years before I think it finally died, I'm pretty sure the ECU went out but I had no time to work on it.

Worst: 1976 Plymouth Gran Fury. It was a great first car but not for very long. Drive shaft was the last thing to break on it.

I think one of the better ones I had was an '85 Chevy Celebrity Eurosport. The tight steering and suspension and the peppy 6 cylinder engine made it fun to drive.

Best: 1998 VW Jetta...I bought new and still driving it everyday...245,000 miles later...
Worst: 1982 Mercury Capri...a fun car, as long as you do not mind working on it every other weekend. The motor was strong, but everything else was not...

PhotonWrangler said:

I think one of the better ones I had was an '85 Chevy Celebrity Eurosport. The tight steering and suspension and the peppy 6 cylinder engine made it fun to drive.

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The GM sedans were certainly more appealing than Chrysler products of the time due to the option of a V6. Chrysler, on the other hand, was obsessed with their crappy and underpowered 2.2/2.5 four bangers (which they ran in pretty much EVERYTHING throughout the 80s). For them, more power meant trying to squeeze it out of their wheezy engines with turbocharging, with generally less than satisfactory results.