Just joking, but me it was the 2002 Ford Explorer and its endless problems with the transmission, the wheels, the windows and everything else that could go wrong.
Just looking at carcomplaints can show you the size of the problem, with 1,500 reports of transmission problems alone.
My first car was a 1991 VW Fox. For it’s age it held up well, never leaked oil, but definitely had a decent set of issues. My favorites were loosing the linkage on my way to a breakfast date, and blowing my coolant hose up as I was arriving at the local sledding hill. Luckily there was a house next to the hill and the guy saw the smoke coming from under the hood and got us some duct tape to piece it together to get home, and I had water bottles in the back. Still my all time favorite car but I couldn’t get it to pass inspection because of the frame damage from the rust belt.
Briefly had a 2008 Subaru Impreza, but that’s my dads car now. Previous owner jumped it backwards and blew the TCU and destroyed the transmission. We swapped those out, which was the easiest swap I’ve ever done on a car; bar from dropping the transmission from the jack onto my hand. Last I heard my dad recently replaced the shocks on it.
My current car is a 2010 Jetta that has a massive oil leak, I just keep it topped up and 5 quarts of oil in my trunk, gotta be damage to the filter housing and I have a new one but I’ve put off doing it for like a year now. I also blew a tranny about a year after owning it, then I also lost the transmission in the car ;) (My dad hates this joke lol) The previous owners took it to AAMCO and the gear oil had been grossly underfilled. Swapped that out and it’s been running great since. In hindsight I should’ve done the filter housing at the same time as the transmission but I still thought it might’ve been the vacuum pump seal and replaced the gasket on that before learning it wasn’t. It was leaking a bit anyway so I’m glad I did.
One of our early car purchases was an Audi A4. I don’t recall the exact model year but it would have been mid 2000s. That car was so dang cool at the time, but unfortunately it was also a nightmare. It was one problem after another and each incident was expensive.
My dad told me it was pronounced Ford Exploder…
still better than the cybertruck.
There’s a reason it’s nickname is the Ford Exploder.
Our 1997 Exploder blew it’s transmission.
I see your Ford Explorer and raise you one GM J-Body (Chevrolet Cavalier, Pontiac Sunfire, Cadillac Cimarron).
The 2nd and 3rd gen Taurus was also really a dog, and firmly cemented the public perception that “Ford is crap” in the 2000’s and 2010’s.
I an offer the following
dataanecdotes on that:- My uncle had a 1st gen one, traded it in for a 2nd gen and the transmission blew up.
- My sister had one, and the transmission blew up.
- Before we were married my spouse had one, and the transmission blew up.
- I had two friends who owned one each, one a regular Taurus and the other an SHO, and on both of them the transmissions blew up.
In retrospect, maybe making the car progressively heavier and heavier with each successive model year but still using the same dinky transmission as a cost cutting measure wasn’t the best idea.
Could be worse, like Ford Europe starting the huge cancerous trend of wet timing belts.
It was always stupid that they handicapped what was otherwise a pretty good platform with such a shit transmission. The Vulcan v6 was a tough puppy.
I was still amazed at the stupidity of them bringing back the Taurus name after it’s hiatus. Should have just kept the 500 name.
I bought my dad’s early 2000s Jeep Liberty off him for $1k. Every time I brought it to the mechanic, it cost another $1k to fix. The tow was extremely loose, so it felt like I was driving on ice. Hated it so much. Finally traded it in for a used Toyota RAV4.
