Okay, now I'm thinking of automobiles that influenced my life, beginning with the ancient creaking rusted-out "army surplus" jeep of my adolescence, trying to decide which one proved the most troublesome.
I think, hands down, it has to go to a 1973 American Motors Gremlin.
The vehicle was very old by the time I got it, but its mileage (true mileage) was in the mid-five figures (56,000, if I recall correctly), and it had been owned by the ancient grandmother of a friend, who had had it since it was brand-new.
A vehicle well kept-up, well maintained.
I did not select this vehicle myself; as has always been my practice, someone else looks around, decides, and then I write the check. This is not so much an aversion to dealing with automobile salesmen, as it is a loathing of "having" to buy something, anything, whether it be an automobile or a loaf of bread.
It's a childhood hold-over; I'll never get over it.
The 1973 Gremlin was manual-shift, the stick on the floor, which presented no problem to me; after all, I had learned to drive using a manual shift (automatics were for sissies), and the parents had always used a manual shift.
But despite this, I immediately began having problems, problems which the Gremlin had heretofore never exhibited.
I was having to have the clutch replaced circa every 5,000 miles--damn--which is about the same as having to buy a new refrigerator every other week.
At first, I didn't worry too much about it, as I then lived under conditions more favorable than those at present; I had my own fleet of automotive mechanics on the "payroll."
When a teenager, while my peers were learning automotive mechanics, I was learning income taxes, and as we grew up, some sort of informal "barter" thing got started, where they took care of my vehicle, and I took care of their income (personal and business) taxes.
I had to pay for the parts, but the labor was free.
But even people who feel they are well-paid once in a while balk at doing a job.....especially if they have to do the job over and over and over again.
By the way, no one detected anything "wrong" with the way I handled a clutch.
I finally got rid of the vehicle after one of these friends got around to showing me the problem.
Apparently a clutch is a series of metal rods underneath the vehicle, and those long rods are kept apart from each other, and in place, using "figure-8" sorts of loops, the holes through which the rods pass.
For whatever reasons, American Motors made the Gremlin using plastic loops (or figure-8s or whatever) to hold these clutch-rods in place. Plastic.
I mean to repeat that. Plastic.
And so those plastic things were always snapping, mucking up the lower works of the vehicle.
I have no idea why American Motors did such a thing; I suspect that even though I'm no engineer, and far from it, even I would think not to use flimsy plastic for such an important "little" piece.
I think I had seven clutches put into that Gremlin in two years, and everybody was very happy when I finally heaved it.