advertisement


Car mistakes?

Thanks to a working-lifetime of poor career choices and resulting poverty, my list of OK cars is by far the shorter vs. the Shed List...

Some of the stinkers, in the harsh light of hindsight:

1987 Mk2 Vauxhall Cavalier LX - suspiciously cheap, bloke lived in a caravan, only a total idiot wouldn't have walked away... So I bought it...
~6 months in, the odd handling and crashy suspension were explained as the black paint in the engine bay started to unfurl to reveal the red underneath: cut'n'shut of two wrecks, badly bodged-together. To my perennial shame, I sold it to some other mug, even more cheaply, with the red in the engine bay clearly showing; I honestly feel bad about it to this day. Overlapped with:

1983 ex-hire Landrover 110 N/A 2.25 diesel (early car) - rusted-out chassis, lethally slow - I was routinely overtaken by HGVs on slight inclines - leaked copiously in wet weather (normal for LR). A bit of research revealed it had done somewhere in excess of 400,000 miles, and not the 91K showing on the odo, and had had several recon engines, gearboxes, transfer boxes, diffs etc. It was actually reliable aside from the diesel turning to jelly in properly cold weather. Oh, and the throttle cable snapped - but I was able to drive it home in low box just using tickover: what it lacked in HP it made-up for in torque. Eventually engine wear took the compression down to the point it couldn't start, but by then I lived in London and it was a liability, so sold stupid-cheap as a fixer-upper. Still on the road in Ireland, apparently.

1994 Peugeot 306GL turbodiesel - another suspiciously-cheap car; drove fine on test - after ~1K miles started smoking like a frightened squid, very lumpy, turned out to have a bent crankshaft! How? Cost me nearly as much as I paid to fix, and was never really 100%...

2016 Toyota Hilux 3.0L Invincible. Turns out the clutch is VERY much vincible! Just 25K on the clock and I'm having to fit a replacement! In all my patchy history of car-ownershit [sic] I have never had to replace a clutch! Exedy Safari kit going in, since Toyota OEM is notoriously garbage. Aside from this, it's as hyper-reliable as the Hilux name suggests.
 
Jezzer said:
Yup! It was huge. I can’t remember the exact cost but it was well over £1,000. I was living in Glasgow at the time and my car was vandalised with a bunch of others while at Arnold Clark. So I had a manual 147 1.6 for a couple of months. It was great!
Click to expand...
£1,000 for a belt, pump and variator? Wow.. they don’t call them Arnold Shark for nothing... Mine cost me €850 (which would have been £650 around then, I suppose) at the main dealer, which I thought was an appalling expense at the time. 1.6 147 is what I had, and it was a great car.

Sounds like you had a lemon of an A-class. My mum ran one (first gen) problem free for seven years… Until the auto box gave up on her… She now has a Suzuki Ignis (which is great!)
Click to expand...
Mine was first-gen too (November 1998), but the difference was the transmission: manual, not auto. I think “lemon” doesn’t cover the gearbox, as it had three gearboxes, all of which had the same shifting problem - more like a flawed design. I still wouldn’t call it a total mistake, though: it had a nice engine, and the removable seating made it a very useful thing to have when moving apartment, which I seemed to do a lot around then. Overall, I felt that I had what could have been a nice car, if only it hadn’t been so viciously cost-cut: the hard plastic trim on the dashboard rattled like you wouldn’t believe, and I only put 24k miles on well-surfaced roads on it. (The experience of owning a Mercedes in Ireland, on the other hand, involved a whole other level of negligent malice where one would normally expect customer support, but I can’t blame the car for that. Nonetheless, I will never, ever buy another Mercedes.)
 
Paul L said:
Seeker, your dry wit has made me laugh this morning, especially “Grandads Last Car Gold”, I will look out for more of your tales.
Click to expand...

MY Grandfather ordered a 1750 Maxi in Harvest Gold upon his retirement. After waiting for it for ages, the dealer rang to say that it had been delivered but was the wrong colour. Spitting feathers, Grandfather took the Blue Maxi and moaned about it ever after. AND saw, later, on a service, a Harvest Gold Maxi 1750 in the same garage with a reg not more than a couple of digits away from his. The ruddy dealer had given/been bribed, whatever, to sell the gold car to someone else. Grandfather nearly died of anger...

Sadly it was not his 'last' car - for some stupid reason he bought an Allegro as the last car. I had to rig a volume enhancer box for the indicator bleeper to deal with his increasing deafness. By then he was a danger to all on the road anyway.
 
LecsonQuad said:
I owned 3 Citroen BX and the only problem I had was that one of them was written off whilst parked in Manchester by 'Joy Riders'. I loaded them up and drove them all over the country reliably. I bought them all second hand 3 years old with one previous owner.
Click to expand...

My Dad also had 3 BX's I think, with the last being a rather nice GTi version in red. He moved onto XM's after that, which he loved but I found a bit of a barge to drive.
 
earlofsodbury said:
1983 ex-hire Landrover 110 N/A 2.25 diesel (early car) - rusted-out chassis, lethally slow - I was routinely overtaken by HGVs on slight inclines - leaked copiously in wet weather (normal for LR). A bit of research revealed it had done somewhere in excess of 400,000 miles, and not the 91K showing on the odo, and had had several recon engines, gearboxes, transfer boxes, diffs etc. It was actually reliable aside from the diesel turning to jelly in properly cold weather. Oh, and the throttle cable snapped - but I was able to drive it home in low box just using tickover: what it lacked in HP it made-up for in torque. Eventually engine wear took the compression down to the point it couldn't start, but by then I lived in London and it was a liability, so sold stupid-cheap as a fixer-upper. Still on the road in Ireland, apparently.
Click to expand...

Now we live in the Cairngorms I really want a Landrover Defender but know I shouldn't - especially as when I was a student I used to spend the summers working in my uncle's garage and he was a Landrover specialist.
 
A workmate in Saudi bought an old, fading red BX in Saudi. I think it was the only one in the country, so, pre-Internet, even basic maintenance was a challenge. Once he had it running well for a few months, he got bored, so sold it and then bought a Ford Merkur XR4Ti…
The car was a version of the European Ford Sierra XR4i adapted to U.S. regulations. The engine was a 2.3 litre turbocharged 4 cylinder 8 valve jobbie, and only gave about 145bhp. Andy Rouse campaigned one in the British Saloon Car Championship just prior to the Cosworth arriving on the scene.
Again, no spares in kingdom!
 
SteveG said:
My Dad also had a 1750 Maxi (and in Gold) and I really liked that car.
Click to expand...

fastest drive across London was early one Sunday morning from North to South, straight through the middle. Those things were quite quick!

Very spacious - you could easily sleep two in the back the seats folded down. It was not small for its day - you forget how much bigger even 'small' cars are today. A Polo today probably bigger than a Mk1 Golf. and so on.
 
SteveG said:
Now we live in the Cairngorms I really want a Landrover Defender but know I shouldn't - especially as when I was a student I used to spend the summers working in my uncle's garage and he was a Landrover specialist.
Click to expand...
I see Malaysian army Defenders buzzing long from the camps, many must be 30 years old and on taxi mileages. They do break down a lot but seem to be indestructible.
 
Seeker_UK said:
Maxis were great - set the model for the roomy small car.

Just a shame the 1750 engine was a poor design.
Click to expand...

The Maxi was a very versatile car, very roomy but also comfortable. As with a lot of BMC/BLMC products, it was launched a bit too early before problems had been properly sorted out e.g. the cable gearchange on early cars was terrible. They were hampered by styling which was (of necessity) based around the doors of the Landcrab. The engine wasn't the greatest, but it was updated and used in the Maestro in 1.6 form, first as the R-series, then with further refinements as the S-series when the Montego was launched. So it was a basically sound design.

Tony Lockhart said:
A workmate in Saudi bought an old, fading red BX in Saudi. I think it was the only one in the country, so, pre-Internet, even basic maintenance was a challenge. Once he had it running well for a few months, he got bored, so sold it and then bought a Ford Merkur XR4Ti…
The car was a version of the European Ford Sierra XR4i adapted to U.S. regulations. The engine was a 2.3 litre turbocharged 4 cylinder 8 valve jobbie, and only gave about 145bhp. Andy Rouse campaigned one in the British Saloon Car Championship just prior to the Cosworth arriving on the scene.
Again, no spares in kingdom!
Click to expand...

There was an edition of Wheeler Dealers where they repaired a Merkur XR4Ti. Used for racing presumably because the engine was lighter than the V6 Cologne engine in the UK XR4. Andy Rouse is a brilliant engineer as well as a driver. He is from a place called Dymock, about ten miles from me.
 
Rcook said:
Andy Rouse is a brilliant engineer as well as a driver. He is from a place called Dymock, about ten miles from me.
Click to expand...

I saw him race many times. A safe pair of hands, very quick, and as an engineer his cars always seemed to fulfill potential straight away.
 
Rcook said:
There was an edition of Wheeler Dealers where they repaired a Merkur XR4Ti. Used for racing presumably because the engine was lighter than the V6 Cologne engine in the UK XR4. Andy Rouse is a brilliant engineer as well as a driver. He is from a place called Dymock, about ten miles from me.
Click to expand...

The Merkur did not sell well in the States. It was sold by Mercury dealers, had no "Ford" or "Sierra" badging, and used the unloved 2.3 liter "Pinto" engine. On offer here from 1985-89. In addition to the XR4Ti, there was also a Scorpio. This was during the same time that Rover attempted to re-enter the US market with a Rover 800 re-badged as a "Sterling 827".
 
davidsrsb said:
I see Malaysian army Defenders buzzing long from the camps, many must be 30 years old and on taxi mileages. They do break down a lot but seem to be indestructible.
Click to expand...

It's the "break down a lot" bit that puts me off, plus the amount of time they need to spend in the garage to keep them going.
 
JensenHealey said:
MY Grandfather ordered a 1750 Maxi in Harvest Gold upon his retirement. After waiting for it for ages, the dealer rang to say that it had been delivered but was the wrong colour. Spitting feathers, Grandfather took the Blue Maxi and moaned about it ever after. AND saw, later, on a service, a Harvest Gold Maxi 1750 in the same garage with a reg not more than a couple of digits away from his. The ruddy dealer had given/been bribed, whatever, to sell the gold car to someone else. Grandfather nearly died of...
Click to expand...
I learned to drive in my father’s blue Maxi 1750 then borrowed it a couple of days after I passed my test in 1985. My parents had left a bottle on the floor which rolled under the clutch as I turned into a side road, that was fun not being able to change down as a novice driver!

Almost as much fun as the trip to the West Country, I drove the M4 then a short bit of the M5 when the throttle suddenly hit the floor and I was in the outside lane at 90mph unable to life the throttle with either foot or somewhat dangerously hand. I had to wait for clear road and go into the inside lane, stand on the brakes, put it into neutral at 60mph then switch off the engine at 30mph and coast to a stop on the hard shoulder. If only I had the sense to stop at a phone box rather than the half-mile between them, lots of laughs.

The final adventure was when the idler gears went as I arrived in Manchester and when I eventually got it home the following week was shown how this resulted in iron filings in the oil and through the engine. It was written off as uneconomic to repair if I recall correctly. I had a lot of fun in that car for a couple of years though.
 
Yank said:
The Merkur did not sell well in the States. It was sold by Mercury dealers, had no "Ford" or "Sierra" badging, and used the unloved 2.3 liter "Pinto" engine. On offer here from 1985-89. In addition to the XR4Ti, there was also a Scorpio. This was during the same time that Rover attempted to re-enter the US market with a Rover 800 re-badged as a "Sterling 827".
Click to expand...

Did they catch on at all, or was it a flop? My boss at the time had one as a company car and let me have a drive. I really hated it.
 
SteveG said:
It's the "break down a lot" bit that puts me off, plus the amount of time they need to spend in the garage to keep them going.
Click to expand...

Land Rovers need to be second cars, ideally owned by someone who either has bottomless pockets or adores spannering. What they really are is maintenance-intensive, but if you keep up to date on all of it from new according to LR's fairly-exacting schedules, they are a LOT more reliable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top