What was your dad's worst car?

[Night Train]

My dad's worst car was a Vauxhall Victor Estate.

It was falling apart and rarely ran well. The tailgate was so rotten there was more filler and tinfoil then there was steel. It was also a browny mauve colour.

Even his Renault 16 and Simca 1100 were better, though they would be close seconds. The Simca had a brake problem, the brakes worked very well with a powerful servo but often would lock on leaving the car stranded in the middle of junctions until the pressure was let off at a bleed nipple.

Most of his other cars were fairly good and would now be collectable classics.
My favorite, aside from the S2 Land Rover 109", was the Rover P5B Coupe.

 

[byegad]

Dad bought a new car every two years or so. His worst was an Hillman Imp Californian, which used to cut out at 60mph plus every so often for no apparent reason. After it did it on the M1 in the fast lane he traded that one in in under 6 months from new. And bought some new trousers!

 

[Paulus]

The worst car my dad had was a 1600 Ford Capri GT. He was given it after the owner unfortunately died. It was a pile of poo, handled terribly and drank petrol like a drunk out on the razz on a saturday night. The covering on the roof started to peel off after a couple of months, so he traded it in for a Ford Cortina MK3. That drove like a battleship on a rough sea, wobbled all over the place.

 

[threebikesmcginty]

Tons of crap cars over the years, this one, a Triumph Dolomite, takes the biscuit though for breaking down on holiday and needing a whole new engine. POS.

 

[phil_hg_uk]

My dad bought a skoda in the 70's it cost something like £995 brand new and looked like the one in the picture below although I cant remember the exact model but you ge the idea.

It was a load of crap I cant describe how bad it was due to the filters on this forum and the fact that I dont want to get banned.

Things used to fall of it quite regularly s**t car, eventually the whole floor fell out of it.

 

[Andy_R]

One of these (but not this one. In the words of the cosmetics industry "this image has been enhanced for illustrative purposes". Ours was a shed on wheels)

It was powered by a 1ltr two stroke, had cardboard floor panels painted with bitumen to "fool" the MOT bloke, fibre steering linkages that kept on snapping (entertaining but not dangerous as it was so slow). Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, The Wartburg Knight (know in our house as the "Cream pile of sh!te")

 

[PpPete]

Renault 4 ? had several of those.

Renault 16 ? had a couple of those too

Despite the weird gear shifters they were good cars compared with the R6:

 

[Bobtoo]

My dad didn't learn to drive until he was 46 and I was 18 so all the childhood cars were my mother's.

Probably the worst was an early FIAT 128, to this day the only one I've seen with the honeycomb grille and the 1960s style badge. Like this one, but 2 door and in a fetching shade of diarrhoea beige.


Fiat 128 by casteddaiu, on Flickr

Nothing wrong with the model, I believe it was the first car ever to adopt what is now the standard layout- transverse engine with end-on gearbox, but it was well past its best. It looked brand new when we got it but it was hewn from a solid block of bodyfiller. Every time my mum bashed it, which was quite a lot, another huge lump would fall off. It had some pretty serious problems with the electrics too.

 

[Archie_tect]

My dad traded in his emerald green Triumph 1500 which had been brilliant- never a moment's bother, and bought a Datsun 160B saloon... it was mustard coloured, with a brown vinyl roof which went sticky.

 

[carolonabike]

My dad had a trio of bad cars and they are just the one's I can remember. First came the Singer Imp, followed by the Citroen Diane culminating in an automatic Austin Allegro

.

I don't remember the Imp very much except that it was tiny but I remember pogo-ing along the road in the Diane because the suspension was so bouncy. I also remember one outing to Sheffield in the Allegro where we couldn't get out of the car park which had a bit of a hill cos the engine was cold. We would get half way up the hill then the car would grind to a halt. So we would slide back down and circle round in the car park in increasingly demented circles to try and get some momentum going before attempting the hill again. Mortifying!

I had one disastrous driving lesson in the Austin which put me off so much it was five years before I had another attempt.

 

[fenfirsttimer]

I have to say I felt all my Dad's 'car's' were wonderful


He always had a van of some sort as he was a market trader & bookseller so it was a work horse but every Sunday he would throw us kids & our friends in the back with a load of cushions and take us wonderful exciting places like the beach or woods. We didn't care what it looked like - it was a ticket to freedom!

He was exceedingly brave & generous and let my brother & I both learn to drive in his current vehicle in the 1970's (if I recall it was a Beford Dormabile type thing then) and he also let us borrow it to go for evenings out once we passed our tests.

When I look back he put an awful lot of trust in us not to have an accident in it -fortunately neither of us did - because if we had, he wouldn't have been able to get to his shop from the village we lived in.

 

[srw]

Is it only dads that are allowed to own bad cars? My dad didn't have a car until I was grown up - because he didn't successfully learn to drive until about the same time I did. My mum had been the family chauffeur for a few years before that.

We had a Vauxhall Chevette (horrible - shook itself nearly to bits at 70mph), a Volvo 340 (the garage told us we could use unleaded. They were lying, and we drove around Sweden on 3 cylinders) and a Vauxhall Astra (dull but reliable - until Mrs W flipped it after we took it over).

 

[Dan B]

[quote name='swee'pea99' timestamp='1317833389' post='1869737']
Rover 2600.[/quote]
Argh. I'd blanked the memory of this particular car from my childhood, until I saw that picture. We had one of those, in chocolate brown. I don't remember the details, not being of an age to know much about cars, but I think it must have broken down at least once on every family holiday we went on.

 

[JonnyBlade]

My Dear old Dad only ever had 4 cars. A Zephyr Mark II, A box Zephyr, followed by 2 different Ford Grenadas. I loved all of them

I guess I was lucky!

 

[Peteaud]

Plastic pig 3 wheel van, with a rear seat made from a plank of wood and in those days, no seatbelts.