I've told you about the Nash Metropolitan that I once owned, but I've never told you about the REALLY bad car I once had. In 1980 I purchased the undoubtedly worst car to ever be towed out of Detroit...a brand spankin' new Pontiac Sunbird. The name, Sunbird, evokes images of being a free spirit, hitting the road for the beach and having the time of your life. In reality this car would familiarize you with being a free spirited hitchhiker because car parts would usually hit the road. Little did I know that, in fact, "Sunbird" was synonymous with "Buzzard". You've heard of "Monday" cars? This thing must have been built on the first Monday after the Christmas shutdown.
While it was under warranty I took it in to the dealer because the driver side door squeaked incessantly. It was late in the day when I got to the dealer and the service manager looked at it while I was standing there. He opened the door, examined it, placed his knee against the door and pulled the window frame out away from the car. I asked if that was the normal procedure for fixing doors and he replied, "We usually take it around back so the customer can't see us do it."
One day when I was sixty miles from home, the clutch pedal dropped to the floor. This is a lot of fun when you are in heavy traffic. The car had 28,000 miles on it at the time so it wasn't covered under warranty. I drove the car home doing a clutchless double-clutch, feathering the gas while shifting gears.
I can only begin to tell you all the things that went wrong with this car. For instance, it had a major electrical problems that resulted in 14 burned out headlights, four or five alternators, and a couple of starters. It ate tires. A set of tires might have lasted fifteen thousand miles. The transmission was quite problematic with the throw-out bearing passing through the pressure plate on a couple of occasions.
One day I stopped at the post office to drop off some mail. I returned to my car and cranked it up. The funny thing was, it wouldn't stop cranking. I turned the key off but the starter kept starting. The only "tool" I had in the car was a butter knife that was in the back floorboard. I jumped out and opened the hood (the interior hood release cable was broken, so I had rigged up a front latch). The starter was cranking itself to death so the only thing I could do was use the butter knife to pry the smoking hot ground cable off the battery. Of course I had done an excellent job of tightening the cable end, so it took about five minutes to get it off. That was fun.
I remember one time when the engine decided to die on thirty second intervals. There was some trash in the carburetor (fuel filters apparently cost too much for Detroit). All I can say is thank God for lack of a safety switch on the clutch pedal. You know how you have to press the clutch in to crank a manual transmission these days? This car didn't have one, thus I was able to drive it home using the starter motor to supplement the gas starved engine.
This car had "Radial Tuned Suspension". Woohoo! That meant you could hear the suspension play a tune as it ate the tires off the car. It didn't matter how many times you had the front end aligned, it would still eat the tires. Once I decided to put bias ply tires on it since they were considerably cheaper. They turned out to be a mere snack for the Sunbird.
When the car had less than 60,000 miles on it, the clutch failed again. The guy that fixed it told me that the rear main bearing cap was broken. This was probably why it had a tendency to leak oil out the rear seal. I didn't want to pay the money to fix the engine, so we left it that way. Needless to say I was changing the clutch in about 15,000 more miles due to slippage. This time I changed it myself.
Since being mechanically challenged wasn't enough for this car, brother-in-law Jim gave it some real personality by ripping the front fender open with his truck bumper. You know how you say "adiós" or "aloha" or "goodbye" when people leave? Way back in 1973 I learned to tell Jim "Watch out for my car!" whenever he left. Jim's a farmer and on a farm there is nothing behind you. There actually is, but nothing that an extremely large truck bumper won't mow down. I was at my sister's house one day and Jim was leaving so I said, "Watch out for my car!" as he walked out the door. A few minutes later he was back in the house explaining that he had backed into my car. It appeared that someone had taken an industrial sized can opener and went to town on the front left fender of the Sunbird. I never got it fixed so it would better deter thieves from stealing it. The reason I didn't want anyone stealing it was the liability if they got hurt.
I kept the car until it had about 78,000 miles on it. I can't imagine owning a car today that was such a piece of junk. I usually get some kind of strange attachment to cars and get the feeling that they actually have a soul or something. Needless to say it never happened with the Sunbird. I traded the Sunbird for a Subaru Justy RS 4WD. I was at the hardware store not long after the trade-in when I saw the Sunbird once again (easy to recognize with the torn open front fender) with a vanity license plate that read "CYNDY". When I was in the store at the check-out line, a teenage girl wearing a name tag with "CYNDY" written on it was at the cash register. I felt horrible. I wanted to tell her about the car, but I knew I couldn't. I should have scrapped that car for the sake of humanity.
We've had numerous other cars that have been so much better quality. A Subaru wagon with 176,000 miles on it. A Subaru Impreza with over 250,000 miles. A Ford truck with 330,000 miles on it. A Scion with 79,000 miles on it and it's never required anything other than regular maintenance. Whenever I think of General Motor's problems today and the billions in bailout money they need, I think about that Sunbird. I think about how broke I was at the time and how GM got $9,000 for a worthless piece of shit car.
Facebook
Twitter