What's the sketchiest vehicle you've driven?

A $500 Honda Accord that I had. It actually could have been a decent car but for the transmission. Transmission was on its way out, too expensive to replace and too involved to repair on a car that wasn't ever going to be worth more than $2,000. It got me around reliably for a few months, then the wheel bearings started to go basically all at once. I was in the habit of checking them, the oil, and the transmission fluid every fill up. It was literally 1 week between it being "good enough to drive" to the first one going, making the wheel look like it was about to fall off - that was when I listed it for sale - and 1 more week (about 15 miles) when 3 out of the 4 wheels were like that. My best guess is someone before me replaced/repacked all 4 at the same time, and did it with pure Chineseum.

It also had a bad battery connection. The battery terminal was apparently made of tinfoil. I'd tightened it after the first test drive, as the car had randomly died during it only to come back immediately, but I ripped through the thing very quickly. I replaced those, but somewhere else the wires were undersized/wrong material.

Otherwise, I once test drove a Miata that was an "I know what I got" ad, but it actually looked like he had it priced correctly. He just had neglected to mention or picture the holes in the floorboard, the 4th (?) gear that was nonexistent, the brakes that may or may not have existed... It was shockingly tight suspension and steering wise, and even though it was repainted at Maaco, it was appropriate for the price, but it was otherwise terrible.

Oh, I forgot I once owned a $300 Volvo. That was less sketchy than I expected, which is why I bought it. If you'd welded/glued in some more floor, it would have been a pretty decent beater. 

In reply to stuart in mn :

I purchased a 68 Opel Kadette station wagon in the early 80s. Surprisingly rust free for Minnesota. However, the wiring was crap, handling was crap, engine ran well but was gutless and safety was not what the engineers were thinking when they designed it. I sold it within a month.

Oh boy, this is definitely my 1974 FJ40 Land Cruiser.  Body Rust, frame rust, one working brake. lap belts, no soft surfaces

In the late 90s I was a teenager in college and I totaled my 1987 Celica.  My very, very GRM uncle told me he had a free landcruiser I could have if I wanted to fix it up.  He was always tinkering, so this wasn't a surprise.  His daily driver was a V8 Samurai and he always had a few interesting projects underway.  I had a week vacation planned for christmas so I took a bus to Long Island...way out on the island, nearly the Hamptons.  He likely acquired the landcruiser for free or in a trade, but it was used as a fishing truck so it was very, very rusty.  When I showed up he had welded steel panels over the rusty rear 1/2 of the truck and somebody had fit an aluminum (?) bed on the back half (over the rusty/missing rear floor).  He also had patched up the floors...pretty sure it was done with rivots and tin by the PO.  No, he did not cut out any of the rust before welding new steel quarterpanels.  The rear corners would have been difficult to fabricate so we used diamondplate panels. 

I ground down the welds and used bondo to clean up the body.  We (really, my uncle) fabricated a new drip rail for the rood and we fiberglassed it and used resin to recreate the original size drip rail.   I bought a gallon of rustoleum in forest green and we painted the roof white.  After a week of blood sweat & tears, I needed to get back to college in northern Vermont.  We hadn't even started the landcruiser yet.  I did get it registered and insured.  Of course, the PO couldn't find the title so I did buy a title from one of those mail-in places in Arizona (sketchy).

The day I was supposed to leave we pulled it down he street to the local mechanic who was a friend of my uncle's to try and get it running.  The webber carb was deemed bad, so we made an adapter plate and fit a buick 2-barrel carb and added an in-line fuel filter.  The muffler exploded on a backfire so just welded a generic muffler and made a side exhaust.  It made it round the block...but didn't stop well at all and pulled to one side.   The mechanic slapped a NYS inspection sticker on the windshield and I drove off.  I loaded up with extra fluids and headed north to VT, 350 miles & ~7 hours away.  As I left my uncle said "if you break down before the Bronx call me, otherwise call your parents."

After the first hour I pulled over due to smoke under the hood.  The extra cardboard gasket we had left on the carb manifold was smoking (phew). I cleaned it up best I could and that was all good.  The fuel tank was dirty and I probably swapped the fuel filter every hour or so (once the truck started to stumble).  I made it to my parent's house at the halfway point for dinner and continued on my way, filling up with gas & a fresh fuel filter just north of Albany (this is important).  I planned to take the northern rout to VT, to minimize the time w/high-speed traffic on 2-lane roads (Rt 7A).  The truck was happy at 60 mph, and staying on the interstate minimized the risk of actually needing the brakes to avoid a deer on a back road.   Unfortunately, there's only one gas station between the Northway & Burlington and since it was Sunday night (it couldn't have been past 9) it was closed. It was winter and it was really cold, but I did have enough clothing to stay in the truck overnight.  I decided to roll the dice and see how much closer I could get to Burlington, I had class in the morning.  I figured if I could get closer and find a gas station, even if it was closed I could just park there and fill up when they opened in the AM. 

I slowed down.  I slowed way down to conserve gas and increase the odds of getting to town. I feel like i didn't see another car for most of the trip.  It was an adventure and I loved it.  I  debated pulling over and stopping but pondered on at ~40mph.  I didn't even see a gas station open or closed until I rolled into south Burlington on what must have been fumes.  

The FJ was my daily transportation for ~2 years. It was awesome....once I fixed the brakes. 

Once the weather got warmer I drove to my parents house to replace the brake pads and cylinders.  Turns out, only one brake was actually working.  The wheel cylinders were leaking so badly somebody actually crimped one of them off entirely.  Ouch! I paid a local race shop to patch the worst rust spot in the frame in exchange for a NYS inspection sticker.  There was an exhaust leak at the header that I applied JB weld to every few months (fixed is fixed, right?).

When I graduated  from college and left NYS I sold it to a neighbor for $800.  He had fun with it, replaced all the wheel cylinders (again!) and eventually sold the engine and parted out the rest. 

It is crazy to think the truck sat around for +10 years and with lots of help got it started and drove it on a 7 hour road trip.  This is long before cell phones or navigation.  I had never done anything mechanical other than replace brake pads and change oil prior to this.  

The 4 pack of beer escort was pretty sketchy when I got it. Front was toed out 1.5 degrees on each side, the shifter bushings were so worn that it was questionable which gear you were about to engage, 2 calipers with not functioning, it needed motor mounts and the tires had started to separate between the sections of tread. 

1974 Fiat 124 Spider. I swapped a V6 72 Capri for it. Which was dumb, but back then you couldn't really get parts for the Capri and I had a huge stash of Fiat parts.

Anyway, the car ran great. It just had no floorpan on the driver side. I mean, NONE. PO had cut out the rusty one and then did nothing with it. The wiring harness was dragging on the ground. There was a couple of 2x4s wedged in between the rocker and the trans tunnel with a seat sitting on them. Not bolted. Just...resting there.

Naturally, I drove it back to my house that way 30 minutes distant. No insurance. No legal tag. Maybe had a title that wasn't in my name.

Ah, the teen years.

Had a '71 fiat 128 for a very short time. My boss way back when sold it to me. The handling was.... imprecise. I couldn't help but notice that the front of the car came up when leaving a stoplight and such. I was young n dumb, but even so, I was kinda wondering how a fwd car could do such a thing. So drove like 60 miles, got it to the shop and I put a floor jack under it and... um... well... the framerails, unibody, basically all the sheetmetal was broken, both sides and across the base of the firewall, just ahead of the windshield. Near as we could figure, the only thing holding the front of the car to anything else was the fenders. My boss bought that one back from me...

Bought a new house with a long driveway so needed a beater plow truck. Acquired a sketchy 90s Silverado that was well on in life. A friend was helping me run stuff from the old house to the new place while I packed. He comes running into the house saying "we need to move you car out of the garage now!" I argue that is the last thing I'm worried about getting packed up, we can get it tomorrow. He persists, I resist until he basically drags me outside. 

The sketchy plow truck had used up its reserve of brake fluid as a wheel cylinder leaked it out, locked up the remaining wheel and been driven through the wall of the garage. The garage was never great to begin with at this rental place and now was teetering on collapse. Drove the car out then dragged the truck out of the wall. Finished moving out (had to be out that day), went back the next day and rebuilt the garage wall which stands to this day with no one the wiser.  

When I sold the truck as an even bigger pile of E36 M3, it made it 100 feet down the road before the rear drum brakes disintegrated, locked up and had to be dragged from there. 

1974 Vega GT bought in 1982.

It had been pinched between a guardrail and a grain truck, so it was about a foot narrower than original.

Had less than 40k on the clock, ran great, $100.

I put another 60k on it in a bit over a year, the last 20k was after the left rear upper control arm mount had disintegrated. Because Illinois.

You really had to plan ahead when getting on or off the throttle.

All of them? But seriously, it's probably a tie. My first car was a 1964 Ranchero, which I sort-of-restored, which is to say I ran out of money after the motor and exterior cosmetics. After the wheel hop it went fast-in a straight line. Corners were a joke, which didn't keep my teenage self from street racing it, right up until I totaled it, and very nearly totaled myself.

The other car might ring a bell with some folks here. The Frankenfiat was (is) a Fiat 850 Spyder  with a twin-turbo Subaru mill in it. It's blazingly fast in a straight line, and not as prone to oversteer as you'd expect. But someone had fabricated a custom front suspension for it, resulting in by far the worst case of bump steer that I've ever experienced. Sadly, I tore it down, started changing things and lost enthusiasm. I still have hope for it, but it's moved to #3 in my project cue. 

77 impala 4 door. When I saw rust or it needed washing I would just go next door to the body shop and apply another coat of red oxide primer. It had 10 or more coats by the time it was put out of its misery. 

1965 ish Ford Econoline van with a 3 on the tree, no power steering or brakes.   This was in the mid 80's so it was roughly 20 years old at the time and was one of the school vehicles.   We had borrowed it to haul our band equipment roughly 30 miles or so to some gig one of the school big wigs had volunteered us for.  I'm pretty sure only the right front brake worked, it pulled so badly to the right when stopping you had to grab the wheel by one of the spokes and pull back to the left.  My buddy and I thought it was hilarious at the time but, yeah.   Apparently state vehicles didn't have to get inspected?  

Dishonorable mention:

"I was worried you'd ran out of oil halfway when the smoke stopped."

- My father after following me when I was driving a $100 '86 Mercury Capri project car to a friend's house.

For better or worse, inspection rules in SE PA tended to prevent a lot of sketchy cars from staying on the road (at least until PennDOT loosened Classic/Antique registration requirements).

My first car back in 1987 was pretty sketchy.  A '71 Comet I bought for $150.  I drove it for less than a year before it needed annual inspection and our family mechanic failed it for suspension tower rust ("I wouldn't drive over 45 MPH in this car - you might hit a bump and have the wheels pointing in different directions...").  It was eventually towed from our apartment complex lot during my parents' divorce (when we also lost the '71 Demon I grew up with).

Somewhat more recently (2005), when I bought my Volvo 1800ES, the drive home from the seller was pretty damn sketchy. He sold it with a "I think it's busted u-joint, but I haven't really looked at it..."  (turned out to be the center support bushing) but I figured, the closer I can drive it from South Orange, NJ to my ex's house near Princeton, the cheaper the tow charge will be (I didn't have AAA at the time).  So I drove it some 41 miles with the driveshaft banging away against the tunnel most of the time.   But it made it to her place where I replaced the bushing and then drove it a few more times before eventually parking it in my garage. If I'd know then what I know now (local cops don't really give a squat about inspection stickers on classic cars), I never would have taken it apart and I would have done a rolling restoration on the body work as I got time and funds.  Probably would have saved me from a lot of the headache cars I've been through since 2005... 

The 500cc Caddy V8-powered Fiero I took to the Challenge around a decade ago. That thing had like a 20/80 weight balance on it and was a nightmare to try and keep going straight. Unsurprisingly it wanted to spin out at the slightest application of power in a turn on the AX course, and was almost impossible for even the pro drivers to control. It was a nightmare to drive on the strip as well since it was an automatic and the regulator wanted to bang through all of the gears immediately so you had to shift it manually. Almost as bad, despite the fact it was likely built primarily for drag racing the regulator issue and only being able to make a few runs before the transmission started leaking meant it didn't post nearly as good of times as it should have.

'68 Datsun . Yes, the doors were cut down (and the gap between the inside and outside of the doors left unattended) and the roof was bolted on with 2 bolts at the header, and one bolt in each of the C pillars. Ran on 3 cyls. Got it for free from the kid that "built" it, and used some of the parts off it for another project before scrapping it. But that 30 minute drive home was scary.

Oh, here's another one.  In the early '80s I spent a summer working for a tent rental company.  At age 17 I got to be crew chief because I was the only one out of a crew of 6 guys (ranging in age from 25 to 45) who still had a valid driver's license.

As such one of my responsibilities was driving the crew and tents around in an overloaded, undermaintained early '70s 3/4-ton GMC squarebody crew cab flatbed.  By "undermaintained" I mean "I don't think anybody had ever done any maintenance ever except put oil in it when you couldn't see any on the stick."  It had at least 400,000 miles on it. All the tires were mismatched. The shocks kept the springs on the perches but did absolutely nothing else.  I'd love to say that it pulled to one side but the truth was it pulled left or right randomly but only on the occasions when it actually generated enough braking force to make something happen.  The steering wheel shook like it was having DTs but somehow still managed to be only a vague suggestion about where the front wheels should be pointing.  Luckily it was an automatic that shifted OK once you got it going in the direction you wanted, but the cables were so stretched that always took some haggling.

Oh, and it was rusty, cosmetically absolutely thrashed inside and out, and smelled like 6 working guys who habitually drank enough beer to keep their driver's licenses a distant memory.

It's the mid-1960s & I'm a college student in northern Illinois I have a semi decent car but it's broken & someone competent (not me) needs to fix it so I need something for 2 weeks of a 5-mile commute. . I bought a '53 ford convertible for $15 & I think I overpaid. Illinois at this time there was no inspection, no required insurance, $16 for a 6-month tag doubled my investment. The top was torn, the interior was rags, tires bald & the only reason Fred Flintstone wasn't powering it was the STOP signing laying over what was left of the floors. Driving it back to the apartment the hood flew off, not up, off. . . The generator was inop, steering & brakes were a suggestion, not an order. Finally, I drove over some railroad tracks & a 2-foot piece of brake line fell out on the street about100' from my apartment. Somebody gave me $5 for it.

I've driven a bunch of scary cars, most of which became scary because of my own neglect, but the winner is

Back in the mid '90s I went to a cruise night almost every week in the summer. Cruise nights then leaned way more towards the Chevelle and Camaro crowd than the little foreign car crowd, so I was always an oddity with my ratty 71 MGB. But the few English car people who showed up tended to find each other when they arrived and we got pretty friendly. One of these guys had a rough 53 XK120, not a show car but a driver.

One time we were just hanging out and he asked if I wanted to take the Jag for a spin. Heck yeah, I've always loved those things. So we went over to the car and he gave me the basics, here's the key goes, this is how to get to reverse, the usual stuff. I said thanks, I'll be back in 20 minutes and drove off towards the parking lot exit.

I was about to make the turn onto the road when I hear ALAN ALAN ALAN being shouted. The owner was jogging towards me and I wondered what I had already screwed up. One more thing you need to know, he said, this thing only has working brakes on the left rear, so it's going to do funny things if you hit the brakes with any force. OK, I say. I probably should  have just turned the thing around and brought it back, but I was already halfway into the main drag, might as well at least go around the block once.

I was crawling along this little two-laner, completely self-consicous of the death trap I was driving while traffic stacked up behind me. I saw a country club driveway on the left and figured I'd bail out there. First problem, I couldn't figure out the turn signal, I don't think there was the usual stick on the steering column. So I threw my left arm out the side and hoped people knew what that meant. Then I went for the brakes, and yeah the thing darn near yoinked itself dead left at the first touch, and I had to make a massive correction to stay on my own side of the road. I did get it into that driveway, got it turned around, and brought it s l o w l y back to the cruise. I thanked the owner for letting me take it out, and that I'd love to try it again when it had all its brakes working, but I never got that opportunity.

Before I bought my first TR6, I was looking for a Spitfire.  I looked at a few, but they were all nice and beyond my budget.  One eventually showed up that was "all original" and "rust free".  Those words should have scared me off, but I went to test drive it anyway.  When I showed up, a father/son pair were waiting in a driveway trying to get it started.  The body indeed looked straight, but the "original" paint extended to every component on the car.  The alternator didn't work, so it was running off the battery.  The steering was vague, and the brakes/clutch spongy.  Yep, original.  It was running, so off I went down a steep hill.  Brake pedal fully down, I blew through a stop sign at the bottom of the hill and coasted to a stop on the other side of the road.  Good thing I could still see the owner at the top of the hill, as the engine died.  They came down to jump start it, and I did manage to limp it back up the hill.  That's when I started looking for a decent TR6.

My girlfriend bought a 1985 K20. 454, 4wd, 4 speed manual, couple inch lift, and big tires. I drove it once and about ended up in someone's yard at the end of my street the first time I drove it. Only one of the front brakes seemed to work, and neither of the rear. Since I had only gone straight, I also didn't know how much slop was in the steering. Had that moment of "whoa, soft pedal" that causes you to really hammer on it to get slowed up, which meant that one front caliper clamped down and took up the 1/4 turn of slop in the steering. Instant hard right, without a whole lot of actual slowing down. Fortunately was only ~20 mph.

The other one shouldn't have been sketchy. 1986 BMW 325es automatic that I bought to swap drivetrains from my rusty 325is stick shift, Test drive went well, price seemed right (later found a bunch of anger-inducing problems) so I bought it. Got on the highway for the 2 hour drive home and the car went from feeling really good and tight to crazy, 2-lane-covering speed wobble as soon as I hit 70 mph. I still haven't figured out exactly what caused that, but I drove 2 hours on the interstate at about 60 mph, and every once in a while I'd hit a bump just right and the wobble would suddenly come back with no warning. The only way to stop it was to hit the brakes, much to the displeasure of people driving behind me. It was a stressful drive, to say the least. I have never driven a car that felt so solid, instantly changing to feeling like the whole front suspension is about to tear free.

Another amusing anecdote from my father: Right out of high school he went to work at the Bendix Aviation plant in Utica, NY in the late '70s. He had his '67 Ford Galaxie 500 convertible but didn't want to drive that everyday so he needed something cheap for the winter and bad weather. A co-worker said he had a '60 F-100 that he had parked because "the tire kept going flat" and would sell for $200. My father went down there with a spare wheel and tire for it, and discovered the reason it kept going flat was because the guy had driven on the tire so long he had worn through the tread, through the belts and into the carcass. He swapped the wheel and tire out, paid the man, and took off for home with his sister's boyfriend following him in a truck. He hit a steep grade with the truck and when he came to the top, the oil pressure idiot light flickered on and it was starting to make noise. So he shut it off, had my now-uncle tow it back to my grandparent's house, where my father was still living. My grandfather comes out and goes "I thought it ran" "It did. But then it lost oil pressure."

They pop the hood and there is oil everywhere under the hood. They top it off and my father starts it up and there is a steady stream of oil shooting out of the front main seal into the mechanical fan, which is then blowing it everywhere under the hood. My grandfather takes the road draft tube off and it's plugged solid with carbon. The 223ci Mileage Maker inline-6 was so tired and had so much blowby that it was pressurizing the crankcase and blowing a jet of oil right out of the main seal. So he rammed it out with a prybar, reinstalled it and that stops the oil leak. The rest of the truck was pretty tired, the rearend and transmission both whined pretty good and the steering was vaguer than even a '59 F-100 should have been, plus it had 4-wheel drums, so he drove it back and forth to work at a leisurely 45mph, even on highways for a while to keep the driveline alive.

A coworker began bugging him about selling it to him, and my father tossed him a high figure of $800, hoping it would dissuade the guy. Instead, the guy ran out on meal break and came back with the cash. He was warned to take it easy because it was tired but the guy was a leadfoot. While driving to work at 70mph, the old Mileage Maker made her last mile and ejected a couple connecting rods. My father says the guy ended up installing a 390 FE and blew up the transmission. Then he put a better trans in and destroyed the rearend and then parked it in his backyard to rot into the ground. He always regretted selling that truck, saying that it had a surprisingly clean body and he liked the steps built into the cab floor because he could set his tool box and lunch box in them and they fit perfectly and would ride there the whole trip. But he also loved the CJ-5 that he bought to replace it much more.

Oh man... 1986(5?) Oldsmobile Firenza, grey with a hot pink pinstripe.  I bought it a week before my freshman year at college so I could have some form of reliable transportation to and from school 5 hours away.  It only had 35k on it, and was in immaculate condition... from the surface. 

In reality, it had a blown heater core, and subsequent overheating issues.  It was horrendously misaligned from New england potholes.  4 different SIZED tires, let alone different brands, all chopped and bald.  And the best part-  the speedo maxed out at 65, and I never even got close to ever seeing it.  Through some sort of general mechanical maladies and a slipping transmission, anything resembling more than a sledding hill turned into a max rpm, 30mph with the flashers on in the breakdown lane, ordeal.  It was an awful car when I got it, and I put nothing but gas and oil in it for 3 years to get me through school.  5 hour commutes from school on breaks would take 7 or 8.  You had to constantly be alert for fear of death wobble, and you;d have to run with the heat on full blast and 2 gallons of water and antifreeze in the passenger seat...

 But that godforsaken pile of crap got me from NH to upstate NY well over 2 dozen times, and never left me on the side of the road.  I almost grew fond of it, and a tinge of sadness came upon me as I drove it into the scrapyard and watched the crusher send it to its well-deserved death. 

1956 Humber Super Snipe.

In the latter half of the 1980s I worked a second job for a buddy who ran a XMAS tree lot. It was very profitable as it was the closest lot to Beverly Hills (BH would not allow a lot inside their city limits). Entertainment people were often there and they preferred their trees etc to be delivered. My second year I started doing evening deliveries.

The delivery vehicle was a mid to late 70's dark blue Chevy van. Most of the body parts had dents; the driver’s side door was roped shut, the sliding door had to be forcefully opened from outside, the back doors had a padlock hasp to keep it usable. When full of trees for delivery the passenger side door was the only way out. It was easily comparable to a burglar’s van – in BH that was a bit of a problem. But it was a badly taped on headlight that got the attention and a ticket.

It started every time but with a terrible grinding noise. It seemed to be running on less than 8 cylinders most of the time – but it kept running . . . somehow. Its operational characteristics were very similar to the van NickD mentioned (which is what reminded me of this rolling dumpster). Wonky fuel gauge – check (just gas it up every day), speedometer useless – check, automatic transmission count the clicks – check, driver’s seat mostly duct tape – check.

Of course its condition may have helped tips-wise or maybe the season just put people in a generous mood. Me and a helper delivered trees (yes plural) to Cher (sans Sonny). After taking a few minutes to help move some valuable items away from where the main tree was to go we each received $250. That is why I did it for about 5 or 6 years running.