I love driving cars. I always have. And I don’t just mean cars that are rewarding on twisty back roads, but all kinds. You see, I suffer from a kind of automotive ADHD, which requires that I experience driving as many different cars as possible, just to experience that indescribable subjective feel that seems unique to every model. I have enjoyed almost all of them, for one reason or another. There is only one that stands out as a the one that I simply despised every time I got behind the wheel – my college roommate’s ’62 Chevy Bel Air.
My college best friend Dan came from a family that teemed with interesting wheels. His father’s Mopars were new experiences for me, as were the International Travelall and Scout. Added to my father’s tendency towards big FoMoCo stuff and my mother’s family’s stable of late model GM cars, my early driving experience was pretty varied.
In the summer of 1980, Dan told me his father had been in for a haircut and learned that the barber had bought an old car from an elderly customer who had given up driving. It was a white 1962 Chevy Bel Air two door sedan with maybe 80,000 miles on it. The car was exceptionally clean and had clearly been well cared for during its long life. He bought it from the barber for maybe $600 with the idea that Dan would drive it.
Dan needed a car because his ’71 Duster had just gone away. It was a car purchase which I had aided and abetted, but should not have. If cars had the same kind of “life remaining” indicator that cell phone batteries have today, this Duster’s would have been flashing a red 3% the day he got it.
The Chevy was a good car – for Dan. Me? I absolutely friggin despised the thing. Perhaps I should start by reporting that I had only recently let go of a 1959 Plymouth Fury sedan, a car three years older and in about the same condition. The Plymouth drove very much like the late ’60s domestic iron that I was used to. The Chevy was (as we say in Indiana) a whole nuther thing.
First it was the driving position. As I would ooze into a seat with all the support of a bowl of Jello, I sat very, very low in the car. If that wasn’t bad enough, the steering column and steering wheel were really, really high. I felt like a 5th grader behind the wheel every time, as 5’11” me tried to scootch and hike myself up in the seat. I also understood why every little old lady I had ever seen piloting one of these was peering out between the steering wheel and the dash – there was no way anyone under, say, 5’8″ could comfortably see over the steering wheel without a big damned pillow to sit on.
Next came the steering. It would be awhile yet before Chevrolet would invest in a decent power steering system that integrated the power assist into the steering gear. My ’59 Fury was (like almost every other power steering car I had ever driven) set up for a steering ratio that took four complete spins of the wheel to get from full left to full right. The Chevy took six. Think about that, you young folks. A tight parking lot maneuver that requires full steering travel? Close your eyes and start counting the spins . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . 6. This was a car with power steering! I was surprised that the steering wheel lacked those big pegs that any decent schooner should have.
During one of the high-level editorial conferences that we have here at CC, it was pointed out to me that Chevy’s factory power steering used a slightly faster steering gear which provided a sports car-like five turns of the wheel. Some further research makes me suspect that Dan’s Bel Air might have been built as a manual steering car with the slower steering gear (and, according to one source, a two inch larger steering wheel) and that Chevrolet’s highly advanced external assist power steering system was bolted on at some point by the dealer. The happy result being all of the disadvantages of slow manual steering and of numb power steering, conveniently combined in one (not terribly delightful) package. So, in fairness, the Bel Air’s steering may not have been representative of the entire breed. But Dan’s father didn’t find some other ’62 Chevy. And the one he did find had the least pleasant power steering I have ever experienced.
Next came the suspension. Admittedly, my Fury’s torsion bars and leaves were ahead of the curve for an American 1959 car, but the Chevy felt like a 1952 instead of a 1962. Loose, floaty, and body roll that made you physically lean into a turn like a motorcyclist. I think sailors call it “hiking”, where you need lean over from the high side of a sailboat so that your body weight can keep the boat from rolling in the opposite direction. I guess this near-barrel roll maneuver was what they meant by “Jet Smooth”. And smooth it indeed was, unless you hit railroad tracks or a pothole, which made the structure shake and judder more than seemed right.
Finally, there was the combo of the 235 cubic inch Blue Flame Six bolted to the venerable Powerglide. It always started, ran and shifted, but once again, I felt like I had regressed to the early 1950s. The car was slow, slow, slow. But it made up for it by being unresponsive with that 2 speed automatic. What could have been charming in a car from early in the Eisenhower Administration was much less so in a car out of the Camelot years. However much a rev-happy 283 or 327 might have worked with that tranny, the old Blue Flame (which did not even have a full flow oil filter) simply begged for a three speed with a clutch pedal. Of course, adding a manual column shift to the wild gyrations required to steer the thing would have made for an exercise program that could sell DVDs in large numbers on late night television.
So, there it is. It was a good car, an attractive car, and Chevrolet sold a bazillion of them. But it was the single most miserable thing I have ever had the misfortune to operate. Even today, some thirty five years later, I cannot look at a 1961-64 Chevrolet without reliving the sensation of windmilling the steering wheel while leaning sideways with six little blue flames fighting a losing battle against a Powerglide. No wonder so many people drank and drove back then.
But enough about me. Tell us about the car that you have hated driving more than any of the others, and what made you hate it so much.
Any or all of the Ford Fairmonts that I have ever driven. All owned by my employer, w/ flat as a board vinyl seats, and the a/t that would downshift eventually, but provide no additional power. I have driven a lot of cars and trucks and thank God I never owned one of these.
It was a company vehicle, a 1986 Ford Aerostar with a 4 cylinder and 4 speed stick. Simply horrid and slow and uncomfortable. The Astro we replaced it was even more uncomfortable but at least it had a 6 and an auto!
Wow, a 4 cylinder 4 speed aerostar would be extremely rare, even when new. I don’t think I ever saw a 2.8 stick powered one either. I did see 5 identical Voyager mini van cargo versions when those were first introduced with the 2.2 and stick. All white, windowless. Only ones I’ve seen to this day.
I’ll give you two:
1) 2004 Cadaver, er, Cavalier coupe – a Fall 2004 rental while my ’97 Blazer was undergoing collision repair. Sadism and masochism in one anti-comfortable ride; the thing felt like I was being punished every mile I drove it. I felt ten years older after putting 60 miles on it, took it back to Enterprise where they gave me a Kia Amanti. That thing had its own reasons for being a total POS but at least it was a tolerable ride.
2) 1968 Mustang convertible, which my dad bought for my mom in 1973. I could get out and push faster than that turd could go. May have had a top speed of 70? 75?
I’ll have to qualify that my 1972 Vega is the worst car I ever owned…but it was a BALL to drive. When it was driveable, that is.
1980 Ford Fairmont. It was my grandfather’s car and the first car he ever bought with poer steering and brakes. It was two tone burnt orange and maroon. Automatic with the 2.3 liter engine. It was the slowest car I’d ever driven. When crossing on the Grand Island bridge over the Niagara River you would have to give so much throttle so as to cause the transmission to downshift into second. Otherwise in third gear it would actually lose speed.
The transmission went after 5 years and the car began to rust from Buffalo salt. My sister used it as a trade for a used Plymouth Horizon….The dealer gave her $350.00
Terrible cars I’ve driven:
’74 base AMC Hornet sedan automatic. The rudest, crudest, ugliest dude I’ve ever driven.
’74 Mustang II 4 cyl auto, air. Veeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyy Slooooooooooowwwwww. Impatient elderly people actually honked at me before whipping around me on hills!
Gen I Nissan Altima sedan automatic. Much more modern than the other two bad cars, and more competent. But, there was absolutely not a damn thing to recommend it. Just one seriously depressing driving experience. I got stuck with a Daewoo rental car once, and don’t remember it being as depressing as the Altima.
Absolutely recognise the sentiment: like you, I want to drive any car I can get my hands on, no matter how bad it can be. Even driving the decrepit Mitsubishi Carisma I once got as a loaner was fun, because I’d never driven one before. No need to drive one again though.
The one car I really didn’t like driving was actually not a bad car in its own right: a Citroën C4 Grand Picasso I had to drive for my student job. It’s got a very nice, comfortable ride, perfect for long-distance driving. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very suitable for city scooting at all, which was exactly what I had to do. Vague, very light steering with no feedback, the sloppy standard PSA gearbox, lots of body roll, and the large front was impossible to see from behind the wheel, a great recipe for narrow gaps, roundabouts (shudder) and stupid little poles planted everywhere to keep you from parking on the pavement. So terrible, I was happy to get into my barely-running old Jetta by the end of the day.
I work in IT for a university, and we’ve had a couple of ’90’s Dodge Ram vans that I pretty much avoided driving whenever possible. Start off with a full-size van, a vehicle that Dodge pretty much stopped updating during the Carter administration, and then add a decade or 2 of differed maintenance and abuse at the hands of a bunch of student employees who had a bad habit of smacking it into the corner of our building, where there was a narrow driveway and a 90-degree turn. Bake in the sun for a few years.
The first one was known as “The Widowmaker”
Ah. This would be the 1984 Ford Tempo GL (red, inside and out) that was bequeathed to me after having done seven years’ duty as our family car. It wasn’t just the nauseating, faded-red of the interior. It wasn’t the AM radio with two front dashboard-mounted speakers that could barely pick up a signal. It wasn’t the lack of horsepower out of its Ford Falcon-derived 2/3’s of a 6 cylinder.
No. What really put me off about this car (and the reason I sold it for something else within months of being given it) was the way it would just stall. At. Stoplights. And stop signs. The Tempo (granted, being an inanimate object) didn’t care if I had a set amount of time between my high school courses at Flint Central and Flint Northern. Nope. Didn’t care if I was running a few minutes behind on my way to my Co-Op job at AC Rochester after class.
A lot of stalling. And when I would put the car into neutral when stopped just to lightly rev it to keep it from stalling, it would reward my problem-solving efforts by (often, and loudly) chirping the skinny front tires. You have never heard loud guffaws through two panes of closed door windows the way I have, when this would happen.
I thought the Tempo was a great-looking sedan when it came out. The whole “jellybean” look spoke to me. It’s a shame it was such a turd.
1983 Mercury Marquis
I’m late to the party again but here goes…Hate might be a bit strong of a word, but for many of the same reasons as mentioned for the hate of the 62 Chev I would say also applies to a 66 Chev Impala that i owned.
Even with its 283 the performance of the impala was anemic.
Sloppy feeling steering , seasick floating coil suspension, and the infamous Powerslide combined to make a car I couldn’t wait to get rid of
1973 New Vega GT…white w/black accents – 4 spd with a miserable 2.55 rear axle !! The damn thing wouldn’t climb a hill worth a darn – two weks into the ownership I came to the garage one morning and was greeted by anti freeze all over the floor – opened the hood and the stuff was actually bleeding thru the side of the block – dealer told me to give it some miles to ‘break in’ and it would be OK ! Right ! Had a new motor at 6000 miles. With my wife and child in the car it would not go over any of our mountain passes in Washington in 4th gear – always third or second, holding up traffic…took me over a year to sell that car and finally had to practically give it away ! One week later, passed it parked on the shoulder of I-5 on the way to Seattle in my Toyota !! (It sure LOOKED good, though !) A classic turd in a punch bowl !! RIP !
Forgot about this one maybe my mind just tried to blank the memory of but I hired a 2005 Nissan Tiida to get home from a job the car was new and quite frankly I’m amazed anyone bought one it was uncomfortable in the extreme gutless with poor handling thrown in for good measure, I drove it from Taupo to Hastings Hwy 5 one of my favourites and a great drivers road, though it was mine for 24 hours I handed it back to Avis after four hours I was home and had my 93 Amon tuned Corona to drive so the awful Nissan went back immediately.
Nissan Micra hire car. Automatic. I rented it as my father was close to death and we needed to get up the coast to his place in a hurry. ( He recovered well, thankfully). It was sluggish, noisy and was nasty cheap inside. Everything about it seemed contrived to suck any joy out of your life.
My sister thought it was a diesel. It wasn’t.
I had rented a Holden Spark a few weeks earlier, which felt cheap too, but at least felt like there had been a real attempt to give it entertainment value.
I recently had a Nissan Versa as a rental (2015). What a loathesome little car. I wanted to kick the doors in.
Its awful engine, disgusting CVT, cheap-beyond-cheap materials, and overall grossness of the whole thing reminded me of the first-generation Neons from the Nineties – and they were laughable crap back then! (Yes, I know the Neons had a 3-speed Torqueflite, but similar logic applies: autoboxes with three cogs should have left the Western world by 1988, and CVT’s have NO place in the modern world today.)
I’d like to meet someone who changed their own actual money for a Versa – so I could smack them.
Ugh.
A Nissan Altima coupe I had as a rental in 2011. Horribly thrashy, nasty engine that made me think I was driving a Vega, combined with that godawful CVT that made the engine moan louder without any increase in speed. It was ugly and uncomfortable, too. The Altima was so bad I actually wished I had taken the Camry that Hertz offered me originally.
Too many to list. Mostly rentals in the past; I never actively hated any car I’ve ever owned aside from the 1987 Audi 5000/100 that I let the bank repossess because seemingly every day, something would fail, and after it started grenading its third transmission.
Worst rental: 2014-ish Suzuki Alto, the made-in-India 3cyl pain box. I asked for a car with a manual at the Ben-Gurion TLV Avis desk and this was all they had. “How bad could it be?” As I discovered on my daily 100km commute between TLV and Kiryat Gat, pretty damned bad. Noisy, twitchy, crap seating, vague stirring-a-bowl-of-cold-honey shift, horribly-cheap interior. On the coast I didn’t need AC but in the desert, turning on the AC meant my top speed went from MAYBE 120kmh to barely over 100. At least it worked pretty well.
The Renault Fluence turbodiesel I got the following week was 500% better, even with an automatic. It took the Judean mountain roads with aplomb but had the comfort you’d expect from a French car on my drive to and from the Dead Sea. My inner 8yr-old boy called it the “Flatulence”.
BTW car rental quotes from Avis Israel are purely fictional. There are many fees and taxes tacked on that add up to about double the quoted rate. Grrr.
Our HS Driver’s Ed had two cars, a ’54 Studebaker Starlite coupe and a ’55 Pontiac 6-cyl. 4-door. The pretty Studie was automatic, the Pontiac 3-speed. The rule was you had to learn stick shift first, then you could drive the automatic. Well, I’d driven my dad’s ’46 Ford and grandpa’s ’53 Chevy pickup illegally, but that Pontiac’s shifter was like shifting logs in a woodpile, and I could NOT let the clutch out without either stalling the engine or going into spastic lurches that made everyone but me and the instructor laugh like crazy. Needless to say, I never got to drive the sexy Starlite, and that poor Pontiac got the blame.
I’ve driven a lot of lousy cars and enjoyed them, even a couple that kept trying to kill me, but the last one I truly hated was my recently-deceased Mom’s new Corolla. Well, it was the Chevy version, whose name escapes me now, but having driven several of the older RWD Corollas I was appalled at how vague and wandery the steering was. Her previous car had been a Geo Metro (née Suzuki) that I’d loved to drive, but this was more than just a chore – it was downright scary. I took just one turn driving family around and let someone else do it after that.
Autumn 2001 I had an Opel Corsa mk3 rental in Italy. Fine but dull, with adjustable steering wheel and height adjustable driving seat. In early 2002, I had an Opel Corsa 2 rental in Portugal. No matter what I did to the seat (forward and back, upright or not – no height adjustment, and the wheel was fixed), I had the worst back pain ever after 15 minutes.
Second -the Toyota Echo I was given at San Francisco airport – slow, cramped, no luggage space and franky scary on the interstate; swapped thankfully the next morning for a Focus, which was a different league altogether. Avis were not surprised when I said ‘can I change this?’
In 1989 I went off to college with a 1974 mustang II. 2.8 liter automatic vinyl roof, no AC. It only had 65,000 miles. That rolling trash heap got 11mpg, wouldn’t get out of its own way, and it handled like a wet sponge. It sprayed oil from the main bearing. In quick succession it blew a power steering hose, blew the heater core one morning ona cold startup. I by passed it so I could keep driving. That winter in the SF Bay Area was record cold so I drove it with a sleeping bag on like a huge driving caterpillar. Something in the emission system failed causing a huge vacuum leak, so I bodged a repair by gluing a nickel over a little piston in the vacuum system to keep it from popping. It worked. I rebuilt the Webber carb and that bumped the mileage up to 13. This thing had a 2.8 liter remember?!?! Late one night something in the ignition went wonky and somehow caused the ignition voltage to increase significantly making the engine rev out of control. That’s what the sears mechanic said anyway, I never did understand that one. Anyway, going down a steep hill with the gas pedal floored I swear it would accelerate faster in neutral than drive. After a few months I dumped it on some poor sap (now I feel bad) and I saw it dead on the side of interstate 880 two weeks later.