Your lump of pig iron stories

I bought a B6 TDI passat and there is so much lift out of it i took it for a test drive and i haven't stopped moving since.

i am in perpetual motion i now and have a NASA designation code -you can see me cross the night sky once a fortnight i am brighter than the moon but not as quite as bright as the sun.

Turns out it was remapped and it was an ex NASA space craft they used it to tow the space shuttle into orbit - you didnt really believe all that crap about 4 million gallons of rocket fuel and 40,000 pounds of trust did ya? it was the 4 cyl torque monster all along.I have a sun visor that reads "drive her like Buzz aldrin"

Confab wrote: »

Well, mine is ongoing as it's my first car. Bought her off my brother and didn't bother checking if it was ok. Admittedly it was only €300, but still. An inspection after the fact revealed:

23-27 mpg regardless of driving style - a tank lasts 350km on average.
Rusted and split front antiroll bar.
Radiator hanging on by one bracket.
Two oil leaks.
Rusting rear axle.
Seats are water stained.
Notchy steering in the straight ahead position
Groaning from the offside front wheel at full lock.
High idle.
Shuddery takeoff.

NCT is up next month and I'm not going to bother putting it through. Great car for learning to drive though - every other car feels smooth and responsive compared to it. I drove a 1.2 Corsa C this morning and it felt like the Starship Enterprise in comparison.

Hence I will never buy a car off a family member

I bought an old nissan sunny as a back-up car while selling my pride and joy a few years ago. It needed a bit of work so the plan was to buy it cheap, do the few bits it needed and get, at least, my money back. Some drunken pricks decided to make sh*te out of it one night, the only thing it was fit for was the scrapyard then. The morning before it happened, I'd fitted a new wheel bearing which cost about €150, about half the value of the car :mad:

And the car in the link below is another one - seller lied through his teeth about what was wrong with the engine. He'd said the battery was too weak to turn the engine over. It turned out a long 1/2" bar wasn't strong enough either. Pulling the engine apart found the pistons in cyls 4,5 & 6 seized into the block. And then he could not be contacted after money had changed hands, which resulted in a bit of hassle trying to get the log book.

landyman wrote: »

Hence I will never buy a car off a family member

Or a 3cyl corsa.... sorry confab, you know my views on 1.0 3cyl corsas from a previous thread.


As for a story of my own i've never actaully bough anything that turned out horrendously bad (well, that i wasnt expecting), there's been some bad cars alright but they were usually really cheap knackered ones so thats to be expected.

I got a free fiat marea 1.6 once that overheated (well i mean it was permanently too hot), would only select 3rd gear at random, didn't like to stay in 4th, had almost no brakes so basically stopped it by using the gears and handbrake, blowing exhaust, fuel gaugue inoperative, mouldy smelly damp interior, 240,000 miles and probably zero servicing or maintenance. And the second day i had i i needed to drive from co.limerick to galway. A friend of mine was in it with me, started messing with the windows hyper active b*stard that he is and one fell down completely while it was pissin rain.
We drove it through galway with steam comin out of it and the bonned propped open using a complex system of a coke bottle and cable ties.

I did about 4,000 miles in that car.



The worst car i've ever bought in terms of 2WTF am i after doing?" was a BMW from a friend of a friend who swore it was going fine and brought it over to us, i trusted him not to screw his friend over and gave him the money. Was only just about running and smoking very badly, turned out to have a failed head gasket and a piston with a chunk missing. Body was good though but i was really pissed off that day. Found another engine and only lost out by a couple of hundred but wasnt happy

Hal1 wrote: »

I just read that, again I think . When you doing another update? The weather is supposed to be good midweek onwards .

Just uploading pics now, got the rear subframe and diff fitted earlier on - me arms are killing me!

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

That paragraph needs to be saved an post in all the threads people start about how much of a scam the NCT is and how its forcign older cars off the road.

Well i have no problem admitting it was a horrible and pretty unsafe car, but i had little choice at the time, was broke, lived miles from a bus route and needed to work. in fact i needed to be mobile for work so had to do the best i could with it.
It also couln't start more than 2 r 3 times in an hour so when i parked it i usually had to find a hill so i could give it a rolling start.
Oh and it actually had a 6-7 months of nct on it and 3 weeks tax when i got it.

You'll be happy to know the car is long dead now.


The strange thing about that car is that it never let me down, it somehow always stayed going. While that car shoudlnt really have been on the road, it can't be used as some kind of blanket coverage to make it ok to say all old cars shoudl be off the road. I've seen 4 year old cars coming back off contract leases that were less safe and more worn out than 20 year old cars.