98 Buick Le Sabre. We're currently trying to get rid of it and get a better car.
Some background: my bf and I had never owned a car before at the time (I was 23, he was 26 when we got this one). We saved up for a very long time to afford a $2000 car (we were both very poor at the time). Now here's the fucked up part:
I had been trying to run down leads on Craigslist cars, which was doubly difficult because we had to take public transportation all across town to go see a fucking car. People were pretty uncooperative. Then my bf says his grandma is friends with a mechanic who guarantees us he can get us a good car. In fact, he already has the "perfect starter car" sitting in storage!
We thought this was the best way to go, as inexperienced car buyers with basically no funds. A trusted family friend who was also a mechanic was guaranteeing us a car? Sure, sign us up! Plus, I remember thinking, if there is something wrong with it we can hold him accountable and get a discounted fix.
So we buy this Le Sabre for 2000 (the mechanic says he's "knocking it down from 3000 as a favor.") Everything's fine for a couple months, except the heater doesn't work (which we knew), the cassette player eats our mp3 converter and breaks immediately, and the CD player doesn't work. Whatever, minor cosmetic problems.
Then we're out in the middle of the desert one day when a tire blows out and shreds. No big deal, we have a spare. We'll put it on and drive to the nearest town. Not 100 feet pass, and the fucking SPARE blows. We have to call my bf's mom and wait almost two hours for her to come out so she can drive us to town to buy a tire.
I was livid and said we should get the mechanic to give us a new spare for free. Well turns out he had just had a stroke and is now in a coma! And my bf's grandma had never known anyone else at his garage, so our "insider advantage" is gone. This is a freak occurrence, not a calculated con, but of all the bad luck.
Over the next couple months, we had TWO MORE BLOWOUTS, which has made me develop a near-phobia of the sound a tire makes as it blows out, Pthuud, Pthuud, Pthuud...meanwhile our car has all other kinds of delightful problems, leaking coolant, A/C failure (in the desert in the summer), a bunch of leaking hoses to the point that we once went to the same mechanic 5 times in the same month for all different problems. Remember the reason we got this car was because we were broke? Well now we were looking at $10k in repairs. It's gotten to the point where it's triage, we just don't fix anything and hope we can sell this car before it breaks down. (This model also apparently has basically a congenital defect where a part that should have been made of metal is made of plastic and can melt onto the engine or crack apart, which can cause hydrolocking). I can't wait to get rid of this bucket of bolts.
The lesson, I guess, is sometimes life sucks, you can't save up any more money or wait any longer to buy a car. And no matter how skeptical you try to be, you can still be taken advantage of. Next time, I'm definitely taking whatever car I'm considering buying into a (nonpartisan) mechanic to have it looked over before I buy it, and plan to have some money set aside to make repairs in addition to the cost of the car.
tl;dr don't buy a 98 Le Sabre unless you are a mechanic or sleeping with a mechanic