Similar threads have been run in the distant past, but now we have some new members, I thought it may be a good idea to kick this one off.
Starting with me
Best cars I ever owned:
Renault 11 GTL 3 Door 1985MY. Reliable, solid, drove well, covered over 40,000 miles in it 5 years.
Citroen 2.0 16v Xantia VSX. Excellent drive, very fast and comfortable. I was sorry to see it go.
Discovery 200 TDi (current) passes MOTs with style! Excellent drive, economic for a >2 Tonne 4X4.
Worst car I ever had:
Fiat Regata Weekend (Estate) 1989 G - so called because it took several weekends to try to figure out why the hand brake would never work. I had to keep adjusting the 'self adjusters'. It failed nearly every MOT on the handbrake. It never passed an MOT first time. It had the charisma of a trench block. It leaked rainwater when I first had it due to a manufacturing defect in the bodyshell. Spares were a nightmare. Even Fiat decided to stop stocking essential bits like the distributor, which also suffured from a really basic design fault. To cap it all it took me 7 months to sell it. The problem was that people didn't know what they were. I was REALLY pleased to see the back of that one!
Hugo
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Not owned a rally bad car. SWMBO owned a couple of Minis which were rubbish. One was rusty the day after it was delivered. The other was a Peugeot 106 - which was a barrel of laughs to drive but seriously fragile. All were company cars so we didn't care that much. Best car.. again difficult it could have been my D plate 323, which was my first and a hairy chested monster. Then again it could have been the 330d or possibly the 530d (which is going on the 31st of March.) I love cars....
Pastime: using a 5 to straighen the bendy bits.
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Whoops how embarrasing.
Pastime: using a 5 to straighten the bendy bits.
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I presume the hairy chested D plate 323 was the turbo 4x4 Mazda.
Oh, wait a minute, you might have meant a BMW...
;)
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Best (not really a car): 1959 Bedford CA Van: paid 95 quid for it and drove it overland Brighton to Kathmandu, Nepal. Sold it for USD 450. Only thing that went wrong was one flat tyre the morning the buyer came to get it. WSP688 as I recall.
Worst: 1981 Mitsubishi Galant (Bahrain company car). There wasn't a rice pudding on the planet that thing could pull the skin off. It was so feeble I had to see my doctor to get treated for depression. You had to make an appointment a week ahead when you wanted to accelerate.
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Best car: 1998 Alfa 145 QV. My current car. Stylish, quick, fun. She's as practical as she needs to be, and makes me smile every time I drive, or even see her.
Worst car: 1984 Bedford Astravan. My first car. I'd never bought a car before, obviously, and my parents had never bought a car for so little money, so basically we didn't know what we were looking at and got seriously ripped off (although only paid £400)
After reassuring us that his wife had just had it on the motorway and it ran fine, on the way home we couldn't get over 50 mph without the steering wheel vibrating so badly you couldn't hold on. That turned out to be because the wheel nuts hadn't been cross tightened, but kind of indicated the seller was less than honest.
I had the car for about a year and a half, and here's a (non-exhaustive) list of the things I had to replace on it:
2x sills
2x doors
fuel tank
radiator
stereo (OK, I didn't have to replace that, but it was awful)
engine!
also had to jury-rig a connection for the rad fan, as it wasn't kicking in automatically, had a switch in the dash instead.
The starter motor overheated from the engine heat, so if you switched off you couldn't start again for about 20 minutes. The spark leads would mysteriously slip off the plugs occasionally, so you'd find yourself running on three cylinders. (of course, you'd then usually stop, re-attach, and find you couldn't start up again. Doh!)
I became an expert bump-starter, as for the first 10-15 minutes of any journey, it would stall if you even looked like coming to a halt. Luckily the handbrake was pretty strong, as I used to slow down mostly with the footbrake, then use the handbrake while revving to avoid the stall.
On the upside, it kept me mobile for a year and a half where I really needed it, and couldn't afford anything else.
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Growler
just curious,(memory deserts me) was this the Bedford van with the sliding doors very short bonnet and engine inside the cab. If so i bought one new and turned it a small camper van and travelled god knows how many hundreds of miles round the coast of the UK when i was in my late twenties early thirties. Happy memories.
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Alan absolutely right. the sliding doors. Dormobile did a camper version of the CA van. It had the 3 speed column gearchange, the unburstable Vauxhall 1500 cc engine mounted centrally.
My darling cousin Morwenna and I bought this thing (it had been delivering potatoes for some guy in Scotland (WSP=Scots reg, right?). I thought well maybe if we're going to do this trip (Iranian deserts and all), I should get it checked over. Took it to Bill Knibbs in Worthing and he says the small ends are stuffed, that's why you've got that rattle mate.
How much to fix? Can't remember but we didn't do it because it would have to come out of my limited funds for the trip.
Did the whole 9,000 miles without a hitch. One airlock near Thessaloniki in Greece, all the way across Afghanistan on the (then new) Russian-built highway to Kabul with the temp needle in the red, no worries.
I can still hear the sound of those sliding doors opening.
Happy days indeed.
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Renault 11 GTL 3 Door 1985MY. Reliable, solid, drove well, covered over 40,000 miles in it 5 years
How things have changed - great car as it covered an average of 8000 miles a year!
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My current car - Rover 75 CDTi. Silent to drive, great ride, plenty of room, useful gadgets and so far utterly without trouble.
Worst car - Pug 106 XL.
In one year.
Replacement fuel injection system
Replacement head gasket owning to leaking oil weakening the original.
New rear window due to failure of heating element
New front wiper motor
All in 9000 miles from new. Total time in garage - 5 weeks out of the 50 I owned it for. Sold it for a secondhand Rover 620Si.
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The problem with this type of question is defining good and bad.
I have had some really fun cars to drive but were unreliable and rusted - original Mini & Fiat 128 1300 come to mind - which category do these come in?
Boring but totally reliable have been several Mercs and an original Audi 100.
Overall the best combination of fun and reliability was a 1993 Nissan Sunny Gti which was deservedly voted 'Hot Hatch of the Year' for 2 consecutive years(by What Car I think). Bought it at 6 months old for 50% of list price and kept it for 4+ years and 100k.
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No doubt which was my worst car.
It was my first, a 1977 S-Reg Austin Allegro 1300, purchased for £140 in 1989 with a supposedly "reconditioned" 1500 engine.
It had about a quarter-of-a-turn of free play in the steering, which appeared to be caused by something down at the wheels: they pointed in somewhat different directions on corners, and made a spectacular skidding noise when accelerating out of a junmction.
The gear level required a big push from a foot to get into first gear, and the brakes were so puny it took ages to stop. It belched black smoke, and never managed as much as 20mpg.
I bought it to get in practice for my driving test, and drove it a few hundred miles around South London before selling it within days of passing my test. I got £125 for it, and a week later a please-remove-your-wreck notice from Kent County Council -- it had expired before the new owner had sent off the reg documents.
I never regretted buying it: I learnt a lot about driving, and my friends pointed out that if I could drive that wreck with enough safety margin, I'd have learnt a lot. Sure enough, the driving school Metro was a doddle to drive after that horror!
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Best car (from a cost of running/reliability point of view): '96 Honda Civic VTi 3 dr
Best car (from the point of view of smiling each and every time I get behind the wheel): My current Alfa 156 2.4JTD Sportwagon.
Worst car: VW Vento 1.6. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Handled like warm semolina, drank fuel, generally unpleasant and topped with a beige interior. No no no no no. Having had a Golf, a Polo and a Vento I can safely say I have got VWs out of my system for good.
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Hi again Hugo.
Easy question for me:
Worst - Rover 820e fastback. Most unreliable car ever!!!
Best - Volvo 940se turbo. totally reliable despite years of neglect.
I'm hoping my new Mazda MPV will emulate the latter not the former :)
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I'm hoping my new Mazda MPV will emulate the latter not the former :)
I would have loved to have been on the committee that cameup with that name. Must have been a close run thing.
Still, they could have called it the Mazda Slug-Beast Friendly Shopper, or some such nonsensical name reserved the domestic market.
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Still, they could have called it the Mazda Slug-Beast Friendly Shopper, or some such nonsensical name reserved the domestic market.
For some reason, I rather like the idea of a car called a slug-beast. It sounds much more fun than the bland computer-generated names most manufacturers use these days
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Best car :
My current W reg Subaru Impreza Turbo. Serious performance, wonderful handling, faultless reliability, glorious noise and the best seats in the business. A true modern classic, and rightly so. Downsides? Thirsty, expensive to insure & maintain.
Honouable runner up :
'91 J Rover 216 GTI. Yes, the one with the twin-cam Honda engine.
Worst car :
1996 Ford Fiesta 'Classic' 1.3 (partner's company car).
Ancient pushrod engine, stone age gearbox and suspension, horribly uncomfortable seats and a grotty 70's style interior. The 'Fester' was indescribably awful to drive, with all the performance and refinement of a 1973 British Leyland Allegro.
The Fiesta Classic was the last genuinely carp Ford (until the Fusion, anyway). It simply defies belief that a major manufacturer could sell such a car in 1996. Makes me shudder to remember it.
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