It’s summer time, and that means increased risk for overheating, transmission failure, and other headaches. Though catastrophe can strike during any season, the increased travel and rising temperatures of upcoming months bring its potential more into focus. While those of us driving newer cars (all things being relative, let’s say those built in the past twenty years) generally have benefited from a higher standard of reliability than in decades past, more than a few of us have experienced the joy of breaking down on a hot summer day.
In a rather classic nightmare scenario, my father had the unenviable task of driving a rented, full-size U-Haul over 1,800 miles and six states, only to experience overheating and breakdown at some point near the start of my family’s August 1985 relocation from Dallas to far upstate New York. That meant switching trucks–and transferring all our belongings–at some remote point in the middle of northeast Texas. Not fun.
But as dramatic as an engine breakdown can be, there are more spectacular sources of mechanical failure, like brakes catching fire on an overloaded trailer. And while it’s always scary when it happens, it can be fun to share stories after the fact (such as when my father recounted the story of his Nova’s engine dying on a steep downhill incline, quickly exhausting his brakes of power assist).
I know I can count on our readers to out-do the brief stories I’ve shared, of course. Which of you has the scariest and/or zaniest tale of good cars gone bad to regale us with?
1988. Cruising around Brisbane, AU, on a Saturday night with my housemate in his beat up 1974 Toyota Corona. The timing chain had been really noisy for a few years, and accelerating through 3000 rpm it let go with a massive bang, straight through the side of the block, leaving a gaping hole.
We hitched a lift to his place of employment, a service station with a taxi company out the back. We grabbed a rope and a taxi, drove to the car, and we towed the car back with the taxi.
Four different people on the way back tried to wave us over for a ride.
Driving to work in 1981 with my 6 month old Honda Civic. The car behaved like it ran out of gas, I pushed in the clutch and coasted into a gas station next to the pumps. When i got out i noticed some kind of vapor coming thru the hood vents so i opened it. When the air hit it the engine burst into flames. The attendant wanted a $20 deposit on the fire extinguisher. Not a total loss but close. A mouse had made a nest in the air cleaner.
My poor little 1982 Renault 5 burning down to the ground in 1990. The Whole Car’s On Fire ! -My Most Memorable Non-Mechanical Failure.
Another one from the past:
1972 Rover P6. A single-carb 2000 Automatic in really nice shape that I was the second owner of. Great car, ran well, but it was 23 years old and the fuel pump was going out. I had picked up a spare pump, tossed it in the boot, and promptly forgot about installing it for a couple of weeks since the original one was still mostly-working.
Late one night on the A52 between Derby and Nottingham, in absolutely pouring rain, the fuel pump let go. I made it over to the hard shoulder and discovered that the one thing I didn’t have with me was any sort of light to work by, but did have my tools. Being a dirt-poor student at the time, calling the AA for a tow wasn’t an option; fixing it there and then was. Besides, it was only two bolts and a couple of fuel line fittings.
Making do, I changed the pump out at the side of the road using a Zippo for periodic illumination while five-star petrol leaked everywhere, including onto me. How on earth either that car, myself, or both weren’t completely immolated during this process is still something of a mystery to me to this day.
My best/only big failure was the killing of an innocent Mercedes 240D (W123)…paid $500 for it, had a noisy engine. The poor thing was so slow it was almost dangerous in traffic. I was leaving Plaza Motors in Creve Coeur MO, and “gunned it”, such as it was…KAPOW, there was a cloud of smoke, and a trail of engine parts on Ballas Rd, along with a huge oil stain on the road.
A con rod had let go, and punched a hole in the block that my fist would fit through. Sold the remains to a guy who wanted the 4 speed manual pieces for his 240D for a couple of hundred bucks.
Just before my 21st birthday I replaced the Powerglide in my ’67 Malibu with a THM 375 – loved the difference. But since I’d acquired a THM 375 and not the correct THM 350 I had to have a custom drive shaft made.
Later doing the math I discovered that the drive shaft’s critical speed would be reached if the car was going about 113 MPH. Prior destructive testing confirmed those numbers.
It was spectacular when it happened late at night on a deserted freeway. Had the car back together and running within the week. Kept the drive shaft as a reminder to not do stupid things in cars.
My mum’s 1970 Morris 1300 (Austin America for transatlantic readers) ended its days by suffering a fracture of some small but crucial part in the gear selector mechanism which meant that as she was turning into our driveway, it changed into first and reverse simultaneously. Took a while to move…
And one of its successors, a 1977 Renault 6TL (sort of larger and plusher Renault 4, now more or less extinct as whatever their virtues they rusted like billy-o – the 1971 model she had before actually had the floor fall out – but I digress) gave me a bit of a surprise as I was driving down the A14 in my early driving days. The cooling system on them was a bit unusual as there was no header tank on the radiator but instead a glass expansion bottle, a bit like a catering size Branston pickle jar, with various rubber hoses, drain cocks etc. running from it, and a pressure relief valve in the lid.
I was cruising along at a steady 70-75 m.p.h. when there was a muffled bang and forward vision disappeared. On coasting to a halt and getting out I found the car apparently covered in oxtail soup. Further investigation under the bonnet showed that the expansion tank had vanished apart from four or five little bits of broken glass.
What had happened was that there was a slight leak in the head gasket, and instead of boiling off all the water as usually happens, there was exhaust leaking into the coolant so that the pressure increased gradually in the system. As the release valve was faulty the pressure kept rising until the expansion bottle exploded. The problem hadn’t raised its head before as the car was usually used just for local runs – it took a sustained high speed run to make it apparent.
It didn’t help matters that the tow rope broke on the way back and it cannoned into the back of my dad’s newish Cortina. We dragged the Renault into a layby beside a traveller encampment, took the tax disc and the battery out, left the windows open and the keys in the ignition and abandoned it it to its fate.
Worst car experience was the 2002 Buick Rendezvous. At the time I was 16 and was just beginning my own endeavors in the automotive world.
Two weeks after my mom drove it off the dealer lot, the valve train grenaded on the I-84/CT 8 Mixmaster outside of Waterbury, CT. The car limped off the highway like a dog that just had its ass kicked in a fight. We waited for 3 hours in a downpour in a less than desirable part of the city while the flatbed came for us- Onstar had given the driver the wrong location… 3 weeks in the shop and she came out with a new short block and rebuilt heads. Bear in mind this is a BRAND NEW CAR. Turns out that there was a metallurgical defect in the valve retainer locks that caused the valves to fail and then cause massive interference in the engine. Apparantly, this defect only affected the first 200 or so models off the assembly line, so we know that mom’s roach was from the short end of the learning curve.
Fast forward about 4 months, and now an official licensed driver, I took the Buick out to McDonalds to get some food as the folks were out to dinner for the evening. No sooner had i pulled out the parking lot when the dashboard lit up like an Epcot fireworks display: HOT ENGINE COOLANT TEMP!! DING DING DING!!
For the second time in the car’s history, it limped off the main road, this time to our driveway. What was a 2 mile journey that should have taken 3 minutes took a half hour because I had to keep pulling over to shut the engine off and cool. After eating a cold Big Mac and my parents return, Dad and I took the car for a test drive to further assess what was happening. What we found after less than a 1/4 mile into our drive, was the entire contents of the cooling system vomiting itself out from the cylinder head. We took the car home where the engine seized in our driveway with the most horrible noise I have ever heard a car make; it was just a complete stop of the internals, like jamming a fork in a garbage disposal. Once again, another 2 weeks in the service department for a full engine rebuild, new heads and new intake manifold. The root cause: the original dealership that performed the first repair reused the old head gaskets. This caused a coolant leak and the plastic intake manifold to warp, which leaked coolant into the combustion chamber and caused the block to hydro lock. Luckily, the heads took the brunt of the force and the block was spared from cracking…we think.
The Rendezvous was promptly turned in off lease and Mom and Dad swore off GM for life.
I was at the high end of the 1/4 mile at the local dragstrip when the engine locked up on me. When I got the car home and pulled the engine I discovered a broke crank and 2 rod bent around it. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
Coventry Climax would of welded a patch over that hole. It took about 40 hours of machine time to make one of those blocks; that was a lot money to toss away. As long as the rod only ventilated the block, didn’t mangle the bearing saddles or cylinders, weld that puppy!
I saw a brand new Ford Fiesta with a similar hole; connecting rod had karate chopped the starter in half on it’s way out. We figured the owner had shifted into first, intending to get third….and had dropped the clutch after making the shift. Instant 13,000 revs…
I saw a friend’s Imp race car have a clutch pressure plate explode as he shifted into 2nd gear at the start of a race, it completely separated the engine and gearbox. After the race we went down to the marshall’s post (corner workers?) where they had swept up all the pieces left on the track and picked out the pieces of the block that mounted the bellhousing so they could be welded back on. The pieces of bellhousing and the twisted clutch fork went back in the bin.
Another one was at a skidpan, a guy was doing more burnouts and donuts than going around the course. He stopped to do another burnout, and as he rotated a bit we could see that the huge cloud of smoke wasn’t coming from the tyres but underneath the car, and before we could get his attention the clutch plate exploded and a couple of pieces were thrown 200 yards, up a grass bank and through a cyclone mesh fence where they began to set the grass on fire due to the heat. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever seen..
I put a 300 hp engine in front of a stock, 94 subaru drivetrain with 225k miles. Got into boost in 2nd gear and SNAP, no gears. Was convinced I broke one of the noisy bits in the trans. But when I dropped it I found this.
How about a roped up front suspension? My sisters Fiat 128 3P. I was driving it to mates, took a shortcut through a dirt track. On a dark,dark night out in the scrub.
Hit a pothole & tore the (rust weakened) castor strut mounting out of the subframe.
Walked to the nearest house, rang my mate. He picked me up & we towed the Fiat to his place. Come the next morning, I survey the damage.
The CV joint had come apart- I remember chasing the steel balls in the grass. Reassemble the CV, lash the lower control arm to the subfame with rope- in my poor
imitation of a truckies hitch.
I tensioned the rope so it pulled the control arm
far enough forward to the wheel clear of the mudguard. Tried a test drive. Pulled to the
left, hardly suprising considering the castor difference from side to side.
Managed to limp it home at 50 KMH, a trip of 20 odd KM.
Rope to the rescue!
That would have been my first car… a ’74 Pinto with a stick. I used to, er, “powershift” it a lot (like it had any power LOL!) as well as ramp it over several local rr crossings. Little beknownst to me one day I had cracked the transmission housing. Being a Pinto I just looked the other way at the small puddles it left behind, at least until that fateful day that the transmission seized. At 35 mph. That transmission locked up tighter than Ft. Knox and the rear wheels followed suit. Twisted the driveshaft too. That was the end of my poor Pinto.
The most memorable experience was certainly the driveshaft coming loose at 60mph on my ’82 Delta 88. That was fun… I swear that car was possessed, as things broke on it that I had never had happen on any of my other cars in over 30 years of driving. Everything from trunk lid springs (a big “ouch” as the trunk lid fell on my head) to the horn (came loose and beeped on every bump, causing other drivers to give me funny looks) to power windows (shorting out wide open in a major thunderstorm). And, when it chose to overheat, it did so at 5am in Spanish Harlem (a busy local crack dealer and a couple of his customers were shocked when a white guy walked up and inquired as to the location of the nearest payphone (pre-cellphone era), that being the safer alternative than remaining a sitting duck in a disabled car in that neighborhood).That’s just minor annoyances, though. The car also ate up an engine and two transmissions, in less than two years of ownership – in the early 1990s, when it was less than 10 years old with only about 70K miles on it. So the driveshaft episode was the last straw. I got out, walked to the nearest phone and called the nearest junk yard. The guy couldn’t believe his luck, snagging a nice, clean, apparently easily repairable Olds for $50. But I knew better.
I had a 1971 Volvo 142S, an OHV 4-banger with SU side draft carbs. Overall, the car was bulletproof and turned out to be one of the most resilient and reliable cars I have ever owned. So, driving in the GSParkway in NJ from Connecticut tooling along just fine, when I hear a sudden rapid rattling/chattering sound from under the hood. Uh oh. The noise stopped after a few seconds, but I maintained this car and knew this was not good. There were no warnings (lights, gauges, smoke) so I continued to my exit. After stopping, the engine started bucking like a bronco! I nursed it home and after pulling the valve cover I saw the #3 cylinder intake valve was stuck open. I also saw that one of the 1/4″ bolts that held the air filter was MISSING…yes, it jingled loose and made its way into the intake chamber, danced around, and finally came to rest jamming the valve open. I pulled the head, replaced the valve, and all was well for another 80k miles. Lucky the bolt did not make it into the cylinder and the valve did not meet the piston! I kept that bolt with its worn looking threads as a souvenir.