Whenever our family gets together, we tell lots of stories. The stories mainly center on two topics, cars and food. Or, put another way, we all love to travel and to eat.
Last week the subject was one of our daughter’s college cars, her Vega…..which ran on money. This prompted us to google “Vega”. Hilarity ensued when we discovered that it made almost every “10 worst cars of all times” lists.
Popular Mechanics wrote this obituary for it:
A Car to Hate
By the end of the 1970s, the once-ubiquitous Vega was already disappearing from America’s roads. With such a crummy reputation for reliability, the Vega’s resale values soon dropped down near zero. Legend has it some salvage yard even put up “No Vegas” signs to announce that they weren’t even bothering pulling usable parts off the cars before crushing them.
Since we were now all in the worst cars spirit, we began checking out the other classic lemons. The usual suspects were all there, Yugo, Pacer, Edsel, Pinto. However, the ultimate lemons, we all concurred, were the 1965 to 1969 V8 Chevies. Gearhead’s description of their problems is too good not to share verbatim.
1965 – 1969 Chevrolet V-8
Chevrolet cars and light trucks with V-8 engines from model years 1965 – 1969 were prone to the motor mounts snapping. When that occurred engine torque caused the engine to rise up in the engine bay, pulling open the accelerator linkage. This then caused even more upward movement of the engine, and more opening of the accelerator, back and forth until the engine’s rise is interrupted by the hood. Even more frighteningly, the engine’s upward movement pulled out the power brake booster vacuum hose, eliminating all power assist to the brakes putting it at the top of the list of worst cars sold in America.
Happy driving, and may your engine not ascend to heaven.
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Loved it.