Worst Cars You've Ever Driven

[Slash]

Close if necessary. I couldn't find anything after a couple searches.


We've all got our favorites and best cars we've driven, but what are the worst machines you've ever drove? Mine is probably a Kia Sportage; dreadful.

 

[Mikeybc]

An 83 Chevette, tough little car though, takes abuse quite well.

 

[Beeblebrox237]

Oh, this is easy. My grandmother's 1995 Chrysler Concorde is by an enormous margin the worst car I've ever driven. Hers is basically new, with just 8,000 miles on them. It has, quite literally, been owned by a little old lady who only ever drives it to the shops once a month. So I expected it to be tolerable, especially since the LH cars were very well received at the time.

How wrong I was. The interior, for a start, is horrific. The plastics are appallingly cheap and the fake wood trim doesn't even try to be convincing. After 20 years, even though it's been garaged all this time, the cheap plastics have aged terribly and the material haven't really held up. Also, despite being 5.1 metres long (longer than the BMW E38) the interior has very little legroom and the driving position is quite strange. In order for me, at only 178 cm, to fit properly behind the pedals, I need to raise the electric (split bench) seat up until my head is nearly touching the headliner. If I simply move the seat backwards then there's almost no room for someone to sit behind me.

The one good thing about it is that it does make a nice sound on idle, courtesy of the 3.3 litre V6. Any hope of performance is ruined as soon as you start moving, however. The steering wheel is covered in rubbery plastic so squidgy that you can feel the metal rod inside, and the steering itself offers no feel from the slow and overassisted rack. The gearbox is a tolerable 4 speed column shift automatic. It takes about a second and a half to kick down if you want any kind of acceleration, but otherwise it's fairly smooth. The brakes are odd and quite unnerving; in stark contrast to all the other controls they take a worryingly high force to yield any meaningful reduction in speed. The pedal feel is also quite strange, as if the pads have become hard and brittle. And then there's the suspension. My mum has complained of seasickenss in this car. It rolls so much in the corners that you worry about scraping the door handles on the tarmac. The body motions are appalling and there's very little control to it.

It's a turd of the highest order, basically. It feels unsafe to drive and is very poorly designed and built.

 

[Anathema]

https://www.gtplanet.net/forum/threads/surprisingly-fun-disappointing-cars-to-drive.329418/

 

[Slash]

Oh, this is easy. My grandmother's 1995 Chrysler Concorde is by an enormous margin the worst car I've ever driven. Hers is basically new, with just 8,000 miles on them. It has, quite literally, been owned by a little old lady who only ever drives it to the shops once a month. So I expected it to be tolerable, especially since the LH cars were very well received at the time.

How wrong I was. The interior, for a start, is horrific. The plastics are appallingly cheap and the fake wood trim doesn't even try to be convincing. After 20 years, even though it's been garaged all this time, the cheap plastics have aged terribly and the material haven't really held up. Also, despite being 5.1 metres long (longer than the BMW E38) the interior has very little legroom and the driving position is quite strange. In order for me, at only 178 cm, to fit properly behind the pedals, I need to raise the electric (split bench) seat up until my head is nearly touching the headliner. If I simply move the seat backwards then there's almost no room for someone to sit behind me.

The one good thing about it is that it does make a nice sound on idle, courtesy of the 3.3 litre V6. Any hope of performance is ruined as soon as you start moving, however. The steering wheel is covered in rubbery plastic so squidgy that you can feel the metal rod inside, and the steering itself offers no feel from the slow and overassisted rack. The gearbox is a tolerable 4 speed column shift automatic. It takes about a second and a half to kick down if you want any kind of acceleration, but otherwise it's fairly smooth. The brakes are odd and quite unnerving; in stark contrast to all the other controls they take a worryingly high force to yield any meaningful reduction in speed. The pedal feel is also quite strange, as if the pads have become hard and brittle. And then there's the suspension. My mum has complained of seasickenss in this car. It rolls so much in the corners that you worry about scraping the door handles on the tarmac. The body motions are appalling and there's very little control to it.

It's a turd of the highest order, basically. It feels unsafe to drive and is very poorly designed and built.

Those 3.3Ls are gas pigs and slow as all hell. I have one

 

[Leonidae@MFT]

70's M-B 200D, the one with vertical headlights.. Everything in that car was vague, loose and sloppy. Powersteering was too light and had half a dozen turns from lock to lock, the gearbox was like throwing a dice and hoping for the best, brake pedal was spongy and that N/A diesel motor had performance urges of 350lbs walmartian.

 

[Beeblebrox237]

Those 3.3Ls are gas pigs and slow as all hell. I have one

Amazingly, the engine is probably the best thing about it. They do sound quite good.

 

[D.Kadettdriver]

A Th!nk City. An electric city car that looks and feels cheap, is quite unpleasant to drive at any speed above 50 km/h, is allegdly able to seat four people but really is not (which one might already be able to tell by simply looking at it), yet costed nearly 30k when new...

 

[Sertsa]

I've driven and owned a few bad ones, but the worst car experience was a 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. That car wouldn't stop breaking things, no matter how much was done to it. It was even worse than the Chevette and Pinto I also owned at one point.

I vividly remember a Friday when I was in music school. I was driving back to the dorm from a mechanic shop after spending more than I could afford to get various issues fixed. I was thinking, "It's Spring, I don't have any performances this weekend, I have a newly fixed up car maybe I should go somewh..." THUMP, Screeeeeeeeee... I pulled over, walked behind my car and saw that the right side of the bumper had just fallen off. And I started laughing. It was all I could do. I was just standing behind my car, staring at the collapsed bumper, laughing. Fortunately this was in front of an apartment complex and a girl happened by who let my borrow some of her rope (!).

So, even now, whenever I consider buying a car and think a GM may be worth considering, I remember that Olds, all the problems and the day I stood in the road laughing at my ever-broken car and decide, Nope.


Honorable mentions are the Chevette and Pinto mentioned above. Actually the Pinto wasn't that bad, mainly because I bought it for $200 and it was my first manual transmission car. Its reputation came in handy as no one tailgates a Pinto. The Chevette was just miserable, just slightly less problem-prone than the Olds. For more recent cars, a few years ago I was taking a round trip drive from Cleveland to Indianapolis, and was told to rent a car for business expense reasons. I was given a brand new PT Cruiser. My first thought was, Nooooo, but then I thought I'd give it a chance. For a while it was okay, but about half way into the return trip I couldn't wait to get out of it. And I got a speeding ticket in the thing.

 

[Slash]

Amazingly, the engine is probably the best thing about it. They do sound quite good.

I do kinda like mine; it's very distinct for a 6 cylinder. Though the muffler I have kinda makes it more just loud rather than an actual note.

 

[20832]

Peugeot 108, by a long shot!

It's overall size is nice, and even for a big guy like me, the overall space is plenty and the "cutesy" design has been replaced by a more mature styling, and the overall visibility was great, but the overall driving experience was simply horrible!

The clutch has absolutely no bite point, the brakes are mushy, the steering is direct and quick, but lacks any type of feedback, the small 3 Cyl. engine has as much torque as a sewing machine and sound insulation is non - existent meaning that a drive over the Autobahn at 120kph was unbearably loud and obnoxious! The seats lack any form of support and are uncomfortable, so driving long periods would be tiring and just unbearable.

It's sad, since the Kia Picanto shows that a City car can be very, very good, not to mention that Peugeot can do so much more!

 

[Doog]

I haven't driven a lot of cars (grand total is probably less than 25 so far), but an '05 Sonata GL 4cyl was probably the worst. It had about 90,000 miles and mediocre maintenance habits at the time, but it felt more akin to a car with much higher mileage. You can take away a lot about the refinement of a car by how much vibrations you can feel while the car's idling. Some luxury cars I've been in have almost none, whilst some cheaper cars have felt downright buzzy. The Sonata felt just as buzzy as any other cheap car I've been in. I wouldn't consider a 4cyl midsize sedan to be lacking for power, but this car's throttle response, as well as the pedal travel necessary to provoke real acceleration, made it feel much less powerful than it actually was. In order to merge on an uphill onramp onto the freeway, I had to prod the throttle quite a bit to get the car to 'wake up' and start accelerating, albeit still at a leisurely pace. The car could do 75-80mph just fine, but the ride quality felt slightly jittery and unrefined at those speeds. Everything about the car felt like what you'd get in a Japanese midsize sedan, only notably worse in quality or refinement. The fact that just a decade separates cars like this Sonata from stuff like the new Genesis or the Equus is slightly astounding.

 

[VXR]

The Vauxhall Corsa D. In 1.2 SXI guise - designed to tempt younger drivers, no less - it far too easily falls off the boil, meaning one or more gear changes to get back on cam; the steering is so inert you could be forgiven for thinking it has no mechanical connection to the front wheels; and finally, such a poorly designed torsion beam rear axle that literally skips awkwardly over broken surfaces.

A truly terrible driving experience. It's only happy at 80mph on the motorway, but getting there is no laughing matter.

 

[Rage Racer]

This. Daewoo Nexia II.
An Uzbek remake of the ancient Opel Kadett E with a "modern" face.

The interior is worse than in a Lada (terrible squeaky plastic ), no power steering (or it was broken on that particular car), the handbrake took me a couple of minutes to learn how to release it (I almost failed the driving test because of this), but somehow I managed to pass.

 

[Murcie_LP640]

Objectively worst is by far and away my old Suzuki Sierra, but subjectively it would have to be the Kia Rio Sports Pac, which was made far far worse by looking a little bit like this:

Noisy, terrible build quality, the engine was absolutely gutless, the shifter was rubbery when warm and almost unbearably notchy when cold, it wallowed about around corners, it was extremely underdamped...etc. etc.

I felt like it was the ultimate troll car though simply because of the incredibly unashamed ripoff of the WRX STi bodykit. I mean, if you want to play spot the difference:

 

[synchromesh]

Both me and my Dad agree the worst vehicle I've ever driven was my brother's Ford Ranger he had a few years ago. Slow, steering was very vague, the 4 speed automatic was lousy, and was about as refined as a battlefield. It was bad for a pickup truck even.

 

[Stotty]

Worst I've owned was a Marina 1.8TC 'Jubilee Edition' in a fetching shade of yellowy green, bought in 1986 for £50 after I wrote my 160J SSS off. Monumentally rubbish in every way.

Like this, but with a lot of added rust and collapsed trunions giving it about 10* of negative camber on the front, which made the steering feel like it weighed 10 tonnes, and made the rear highly 'mobile' in the wet... ended up sticking 2 bags of cement in the boot to reduce the snap oversteer.

But the Kia Rio I got as a courtesy car when my 120d was being repaired (some idiot drove in to it one morning whilst it was parked outside my house!) was truly frightening. I think it was an '03 and it had clearly led a 'hard life'. Its most endearing characteristic was to turn sharp left every time the brakes were applied... but it was also horrendously slow, handled like a small boat, had an interior made out of recycled milk cartons and stank of BO and wet dogs inside. I drove it for a day, then phoned the repair company and told them to come and pick it up.

 

[omgsean1]

-snip-

I did remember about someone did rollover their Ranger before sold it to my dad for $700, and he remove damage bed and panels to replace with same everything from another Ranger to become roadworthy.

 

[Moglet]

This particular Camaro:

You'd think a car that looks quite cool would drive well but it doesn't. It's slow (OK so it was a base model but so was the Mustang and that was fast enough), wobbles all over the road due to poor steering, has a hateful interior, has a really clunky convertible roof system and the steering column adjuster broke 2 days into our rental (with only 27,000 miles on the clock). It literally fell out of the dashboard completely:

Luckily it was replaced by a Mustang and that was so much better.

 

[synchromesh]

This particular Camaro:

You'd think a car that looks quite cool would drive well but it doesn't. It's slow (OK so it was a base model but so was the Mustang and that was fast enough), wobbles all over the road due to poor steering, has a hateful interior, has a really clunky convertible roof system and the steering column adjuster broke 2 days into our rental (with only 27,000 miles on the clock). It literally fell out of the dashboard completely:

Luckily it was replaced by a Mustang and that was so much better.

GM...

 

[-Fred-]

A Dodge Caliber.

The manual gearbox felt like I was trying to move a metal rod through a box of packed gravel/rocks, the 1.8l engine made it feel like it could barely move out of its own way, the steering wheel never actually felt connected to anything and the suspension exhibited so much roll I felt like I was about to get seasick, and the interior was such a terrible place to be it almost made me reconsider life.

 

[Kitten]

This easily.

So much deadzone on the steering, its insane. And it just, well its a lazy thing, i doesnt turn well, and the seats aren't really comfy, and well the steering wheel is a tad to big too... But the powerplant is decent though.

 

[Cowboy]

Haven't driven a lot of vehicles, but my least favorite would have to be my grandpa's 1997 Dodge Ram. Steering is very loose and the truck doesn't seem to have much get-up-and-go. At least it has a nice interior though.

 

[jbrennen]

In 1988, a Ford Festiva that I rented (because it was cheap) while my car was in for collision repair.

Terrible car in every way. Well, I guess it got good gas mileage -- but I didn't put many miles on it because it was so unpleasing to drive.

 

[D.Kadettdriver]

This. Daewoo Nexia II.
An Uzbek remake of the ancient Opel Kadett E with a "modern" face.

The interior is worse than in a Lada (terrible squeaky plastic ), no power steering (or it was broken on that particular car), the handbrake took me a couple of minutes to learn how to release it (I almost failed the driving test because of this), but somehow I managed to pass.

In 1998, my parents were looking for a new car, and also went for a test drive in a Nexia. The Nexia was a lot worse in regard to interior quality, compared to our (then) 10 year old Kadett.

This is probably because the Nexia is an evolution of the Daewoo Racer, which was an almost exact copy of the Kadett. Big difference was that Daewoo used cheaper materials so it could be more affordable than its German counterpart.

 

[Ingram]

Two spring to mind:

Dodge Caliber

2009-ish. Light steering with boat-like accuracy, awful ride, ugly, and high-20s mpg (UK) from a 1.8-litre petrol.

I also had the worst interior. Not only did it look bland, but it was finished in pale grey, with the seats trimmed in I Can Believe it's Not Leather of a matching shade. The plastics seemed about as thick as the stuff they use to make water bottles, and felt so brittle that you'd put a fist through the dash if you knocked on it too hard.

Vauxhall Meriva

A first gen model, 1.6 petrol, circa 2004. Felt completely gutless, the ride was bouncy, the handling was wolllowy and it suffered from a disturbing amount of body roll. Suffered from the typically awful mid 2000s Vauxhall lifeless, vague yet weirdly heavy steering, too. And it's surely one of the most bland-looking cars on the road.

 

[Anathema]

1996 Buick Skylark "Special Edition". With the V6.

Special Edition meant the dealership put a fancy badge on a crapbox simply because my grandmother wanted hers in purple. The red one she had before the purple one wasn't bad, just typical '90's GM product, but the purple one was a lemon.

Everything that could possibly break did, and because they fit that big fat V6 in the small engine bay... It was the biggest pain in the 🤬 to work on.

Ride quality was horrific, more because for about 3 years a right front tie rod was either missing or broken (it went through three of the things), but the road noise in a supposedly 'luxury' package was bordering on the insane.

Transmission wasn't bad, but the gas mileage was - it went when you stepped on it, but the needle went down quickly as well.