Asklemmy

Chrysler 200 as a rental after someone smoked my Civic, and I waited to get a new one.

The car was... Jiggly? Like the suspension was unsettling, the brakes needed getting acquainted with lest you rear-end someone, and the steering had too much play. It wasn't enough play to convince me something was wrong, it was just shit quality.

No power. At all. Getting on the freeway was an adventure in noise and hope. Everything lagged. Fuel economy was garbage too.

Looked stupid. And my Civic si that replaced it, the econobox with a hot engine, had a luxury interior in comparison, which is saying something.

Horrible car to add to a horrible week.

Two I can think of. The van we had to take as teenagers to work at the flea market. Long ass shifter that started at the floor of the car, so hard to drive and had to do precision driving through skinny aisles between tents.

The truck of my FIL, I had to literally stand up on the pedal , ass off the seat, to get the clutch to engage.

Also had a 1967 mustang that broke often enough I had to learn to fix it and believe me, this is not something that comes naturally to me, nor do I enjoy it. It was interesting in a way, had to do things like get the flywheel machined. But when you need a car for transportation and are poor as heck that is scary and uncomfortable.

The only motor vehicle I've ever driven was a lawn mower tractor. It does its job but gets boring after a while.

I had to take a van that a baby had thrown up in out in the middle of the summer to diagnose a vibration issue. That was the worst smell I have ever smelt. I still remember it sometimes and it's been a decade since then.

Chrysler Sebring. Fucking battery.

1993 Geo Metro. Scared the crap out of me on the highway.

I rented a Pontiac Matiz in Mexico in the late 90s or early 2000s. Small, underpowered, uncomfortable and just didn't feel very safe. I normally like little cars, but not that one. The air conditioner struggled to keep up with the August heat too.

Toyota Echo

I had to rent one one year because my car was in the shop for a while.

I was being cheap and I just needed a car at the time.

There is no seat room or leg room. I'm tall but not that tall and I couldn't get comfortable in this thing.

And who the hell thought it was a good idea to put the instrument panel in the centre of the whole dashboard and not directly in front of the driver. I had a few near accidents before I adjusted myself to where the speedometer was.

Going to be a toss-up between two of my own cars.

1992 Cavalier convertible Z24 I bought for pennies as my first own car. Had 420,000km on it and grabbed it and it's papers from some sketch dealer.

Looked good enough on the outside for it's purpose of having fun. Roof worked. And it had a v6. But it fell apart fast (and a lot due to my own shenanigans). Stearing became so off that I had to turn left to stay straight. The heater died, I live in Canada. The seat's support broke, so I used an old set of goalie pads propped against the back seat to keep my seat upright. The dashboard lights were blown, so I had a ducked tape flashlight on my headrest to light my dash up. More than ounce, I'd have to pull a fuse and put it back in while cruising on the highway.

Second worse was the off the lot brand new 02 Sunfire my parents forced me to buy to replace the above shitbox due to it's safety. For fuck sakes I despised this car. Despite how bad the cavalier was, it was FUN and quirky. The Sunfire was just a poorly made shitbox with zero power, and non-stop electrical failures the day I took it off the lot.

Chevy Malibu I got at a rental place because they didn't have the type of car I requested months ahead of time. Neither my partner nor I could figure out how the fuck to set the cruise control, which had "get up to speed then step on the brake" as one of the instructions. We're also not frequent drivers.

Fuck that car, driving it gave me a panic attack

Years ago I had a 1986 volvo.

I bought it cheap because it wasn't running at the time but knew what the problem was. So off on a bad foot already but I needed a car.

1. The sunroof leaked in the rain

2. There was a bad relay that caused fuses to burn out if more than 3 things were on at once

3. The wiring in the doors was exposed because there was something wrong with the windows that caused you to not be able to roll them down and the previous owner tried and failed to fix it.

4. The rotors eventually gave out

Thats a little vague. Worst in what way? Most run down? Worst performing? Worst mileage? Worst cost overall? Oldest? Junkiest?

I did a road trip in a Wrangler once, it's an awful car. slow, uncomfortable, loud, poor handling, fuel-hungry, needed to stop every 30 minutes to clean bugs off the windshield.

1994 Toyota 4Runner. It should've been good, but ironically (being a Toyota) it's the least reliable car I've ever owned. The engine loses power randomly and I can't figure out why.

Rental car for South island NZ, MG Excite. Unfortunately we'd just had a hybrid in North island NZ, and had been spoiled by it's good fuel economy and responsiveness, amongst other things.

This car had a label insisting on 95, not just 91. In NZ, fuel is fucking expensive, let alone premium. It also felt like we were filling up every day or at least every other day, whilst back up in North island we'd filled once every three to four days.

It also handled like a turd, wired android auto was unreliable and crashed all the time so we had to reset the head unit multiple times a day, its driver assist was way too fucking interventionist and couldn't be disabled without being at a complete stop (said it could do it if below the speed limit but always said you were above it??)...

Just terrible.

Hyundai Sonata 2019 seats are hard as hell. Rear view mirror is way to low.

Mid-Eighties Plymouth Voyager minivan. Put the pedal to the metal, and the damned thing would hardly accelerate, the motor just got louder. Probably would have been quicker if I rolled the window down and flapped my arms. And if you look at one spot too long, that part would break.

I have a few shortlisted

My parent's 2010 Ram 1500, the interior is rather comfy but the reliability is just not there. At 100k km the engine blew up, apparently this is still an issue with the current ones as the 5.7L V8 still has the same flaw allowing for some components to drop into the cylinder. There's also been random electrical components that have died relatively fast, and whatever metal was used rusted exponentially even with rust proofing being applied twice a year. It had more rust than their 2011 Toyota Highlander that had greater than 300k km

I also just hated when I had to drive it downtown, but I can't exactly blame the vehicle for that.

2011 Toyota highlander, it went through 3 transmissions, 5 rear wiper motors, and it was about to go on to its 4th transmission when they sold it. The 3rd one didn't even last much more than a year.

2006 Rav 4 (V6), this car also went through 2 transmissions, and then had to have the entire steering column replaced by year 2

~2016 Ford Fusion, this was a rental car for when my Civic was being repaired after an accident and my god was it awful. It handled like a massive boat despite being a medium sized car and the transmission felt significantly less responsive than even the CVT in the honda. The seats also sucked but i think that was how the rental company cleaned them, they made this awful noise every time you sat in them and looked and felt like a "casting couch" with several generations of children dried up in them...

Honorary Mention: my friends Nissan Versa, seemingly unreliable and falling apart but it refuses to ever give up. That thing will survive nuclear winter, and will remind you with every pothole that its existence is torture.

Chevy Suburban. I volunteered to drive for a university course field trip and it's what I got stuck with.

• Unresponsive fatass brick of a vehicle. I mean, come on, a minivan has more cargo space and the same passenger capacity without three light aircraft worth of inertia.
• Dashboard sucked. It took me a solid three minutes to find the button shifts. (I know these can be done well - Honda does them right - but the PRNDL was fucking laid out in a thin row at the side of the dashboard. Huh?)
• Overtaking damn near anything would redline the (very new, less than 10k miles) engine.

Nissan Versa, so many weird blind spots.

2021 gmc Sierra, cant see shit in front of you

This isn't really that terrible of a car, but it felt pretty terrible in that moment.

My brother and I had to drive to some location in two cars, for some reason. He was driving in his own car and I had to follow with our mum's family car. You know, the kind of car that fits a husband, three children and the groceries for the next month.

When we arrived, my brother gave me shit for driving so slow, that he had to constantly brake and wait for me. I told him, I was flooring it, but the car just wouldn't accelerate faster.

He didn't believe me. So, we switched cars on the way back. Then he did believe me.

A Skoda Kamiq with an automatic gear box.

Granted I have only driven a few cars, but damn that Kamiq had an absolutely shit gearbox, combined with a terrible start/stop system.

The gearbox refused to shift until the very limits of the rev range.

Driving in the mountains in Andalucia in a rental car with a bad gearbox was spectacular views combined with constant annoyance.

Some time in 2015/2016, parents had a loaner Ford ecosport. That thing struggled with hills. And by hills, I mean speed bumps and anything not completely horizontal. Nobody even felt like trying to get it on a highway, we knew there was no way it could get up to speed safely.