hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3542.txt

Episode: 3542
Title: HPR3542: The Worst Car I Ever Had
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3542/hpr3542.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:11:42

---

This is Haka Public Radio episode 3542 for Tuesday 1st of March 2022.
Today's show is entitled The Worst Car I Ever Had.
It is hosted by Beezer and is about 11 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summer is, Beezer releases 13 years of frustration about a particularly dreadful
car key one-zone.
Hello, this is Beezer.
I've been noting Ken Phan's call for shows and it's got me thinking of a subject that
most HPR listeners will have some experience of.
So if all else fails, some new shows could be created at short notice.
One such subject is out of cars.
Just about every HPR listener probably is or has been a car driver, a most of us will
have owned a number of vehicles.
Some would have been good, some not so good, but Posse 1 or 2 have been truly dreadful,
to the extent we simply cannot erase them from our memories.
The occasional series that most of us could probably contribute a show to when others
are running short might be the worst car I ever had.
To get things off, here's my contribution.
My first cars are actually the worst.
In fact, it was not that bad at all despite being 20 years old.
It was a 1964 Vauxhall Viva Deluxe.
What gave it the Deluxe label was the fact that it had a heater.
That fact might be astonishing now, but it was not so unusual when that car was built.
My father's worst was an Austin Metro.
Straight speaking it belonged to my girlfriend, now my wife, but I probably drove at least
as much as she ever did.
My own preferred mode of transport back then in the late 80s was a Honda motorcycle.
The Metro was a British-made four-seat hatchback car which was originally intended to replace
a huge success or mini, which had become a worldwide hit and even a cult car in some quarters.
The mini was small, as its name suggests, but made very effective use of every cubic
inch of interior volume.
It was reliable, it was nimble and had great road holding.
The Metro was still a small car, but it was a bit bigger than the mini.
It came in a number of versions from a basic two-door model with no creature comforts, to
a four-door so-called luxury version with more comfortable seats, electric windows,
a sunroof and a reasonable audio system.
On paper the Metro built upon the mini by giving a bit more of everything, more legroom,
more luggage space, a slightly bigger engine.
That's where the advantage is ended though, on paper.
In reality the Metro was a heap, at least the early models were, you could almost watch
and rusting before your eyes.
They were unreliable and some of the design was nonsensical, but you only discovered that
when you were trying to fix things yourself.
My Mrs had inherited the Metro from her dad.
She had learnt to drive in it, so I understand to be held a lot of sentimental funny forers
he had recently passed away.
It's about five years old at the time, but it felt the older.
There was always a damp, musty smell when you got in, and that only cleared as the engine
warmed up when a heater started to work.
Starting it from cold was a hit and miss affair.
It was fortunate that we lived in a flat, but a gently sloping parking area.
On a cold misty morning, if the engine didn't start first or second go, the chances are,
you'd have to stand outside the car with a driver's door open,
get it rolling down the slope, and then jump into bump start the engine on the clutch.
Sunday's even that didn't work, and you'd have to spray all the ignition parts with WD-40,
you'd hope we're removing the moisture, then sit there trying the starter again,
keeping your fingers crossed that you didn't run the battery flat in the process.
On this such that perhaps my mechanic skills were not as good as I thought they were,
I got the car professionally service ones, and even bought a new battery,
but it made not one bit of difference.
One day, the engine completely seized up as I was waiting for some traffic signals to change.
The oil was clean and there was plenty of it, but the engine did nonetheless lock solid.
After having the car towed to a garage, it was checked over, and the verdict was,
it will cost more to fix the engine than to buy us a reed-conditioned replacement.
Even that will cost broad deal what the car was worth.
I would gladly have said goodbye to it there and then, but my wife's sentiment
will attachments to the Metro one the day.
A couple weeks later, the car's back, with an effect in the engine.
It certainly started more easily, and ran more smoothly, but the good news didn't last long.
We started having problems with the electrics. The headlights would sometimes just go up for no
apparent reason, and then come back on again when it's later. The indicators were often
globet not flash, one by one all the interior lights started to pack up.
Replacing fuses and bowls were fixing for a while, but they soon start to fail again.
One day, the instrument lights stopped working. It was a depth of winter so it had to be fixed.
I just assumed it was a matter of undoing a few screws somewhere and putting in a few new bulbs.
It was then that I discovered that the entire instrument cluster had to be removed to access the
single bulb that illuminated it via some translucent plastic strips that distributed the light from
that single source. Then it turned out you could not remove the instrument cluster with the steering
wheel in place, so that I had to remove it as well, all this one bulb, complete madness.
With only a couple of thousand miles covered since the engine removed placed,
the Metro had to go into its annual safety test, known in the UK as the MOT.
But for the amount of money that had been spent recently in the car, I would have been quite
pleased if it had failed on Sunday serious, because that would justify getting rid of it.
Against the odds though, the tests were passed, and a day later we drove down from Burmian for a
week into Mutscher in the south of England. On the way back there was a sudden bang in front
underneath the car, and then the engine oak turned to a raucous roar. Sunday was clearly very wrong,
so I pulled over to the side of the road and looked underneath. Almost the entire exhaust system
from the engine backwards had broken off and was now gone, presumably lying in a road a few
hundred yards back. This was a car that had been formally passed the safe and roadworthy just
two days earlier. We couldn't stop from laughing hysterically as it was just one more chapter in
this Metro's catalogue of woe. I didn't bother to go back to retrieve the remains of it,
so also what would be the point? It must have been held together to rust to have simply fallen
apart like that. After a very noisy and rough running 50 miles, we got back home to Burmian.
The following day, I contacted the garage where the MOT had been carried out,
demanding to know how they could have missed disintegrating the system.
All they were saying was that it must have been okay when they checked it, otherwise the car
would have failed the MOT. We clearly mean ripped off by the garage, but with the evidence lying
beside a road and hours drive away, I wasn't really in person to do anything about it.
This was however the last straw. We had enough of freeing good money after bad,
that even sentiment wasn't enough to keep that car in your lunga. I managed to get a part
used exhaust system from breakers yard and I broke there even connected to the car for me.
After that, the cars put up for sale. My Mrs. Port another car that gave up on the metro.
I decided to try and carry on using it, though, to get to work until it was sold.
It was a final gesture of disgust towards me, the metro started to play out once more.
It was a struggle to get it started from cold, just as it had been with the old engine,
and a couple of times I actually enlisted help of colleagues to give me a push,
to get the engine running in order to get home. On my last drive in the metro,
it's stored at some traffic lights, and it was only because I was on the hill that I was able to
coast under the power of gravity to bumpstart it back into life. No more, I was done with it.
Nobody was interested in booking the metro, not surprisingly. We got perhaps three calls and
response to the adverts we had placed in a local newspaper, but nobody even came around to
take a look. When my Mrs. Cartley mentioned this to her brother on the phone, he said he'd have
the car to teach his wife to drive. One minor problem was that he lived up in Aberdeen
in the northeast of Scotland. I told him I wouldn't trust the car to get me four miles,
never mind the 400, he would need to drive to get it home. He said he'd take a chance,
because he'd be broke down, he's car rescue policy, but it gets you home facility,
so the car would get to Aberdeen one way or another.
The metro had a couple more twists in store for us. On a snowy Friday evening, my future brother-in-law
flew down to click the metro, and I arranged to eat him at the airport. I got into a shiny,
almost-eat-die-hat suit, turned the key, and nothing. The battery was completely flat.
It would have taken ages to get out to the airport by public transport,
but before resorting to that, in the moment of sheer madness, I got the keys to the
metro and tried to start that. With the first turn, the engine fired up, and with just the
odd misfire, it got me the 15 miles to the airport, and then back home again, I just couldn't believe it.
The next day, we packed brother-in-law Mike into the metro with blankets,
piles of sandwiches and a big flask of coffee. Convinced, he would soon be broken down
at the side of the motorway. With unhealthy amount of smoke coming from the exhausts,
we raved him off. Sub 12 hours later, we got a call from Mike. He was back in Aberdeen,
and most astonishingly, so was the metro. The journey not be without its mechanical
changes, but the car made it. What I would expect of a few weeks later,
I asked Mike how his wife was getting on with the car. She wasn't. After that 400-mile drive,
the engine never ran again. Various people took a look at it, but all declared there was too
much wrong with the car, we were spending any money on it. Soon after, the metro ended up in
a Scottish scrapyard. Although kept thinking of that much money, we spent keeping it on the road,
where it would have made financial sense to just dump it. Now, I went to the beginning,
that it was the early models, which were particularly bad. My mother, against my advice,
bought a much later model metro a few years back. While it was still prone to rusting to some extent,
it was a very much better car than the one that had blighted my life and my finances.
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at HeckerPublicRadio.org. Today's show was
contributed by an HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast,
then click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Hosting for HBR is kindly
provided by an honesthost.com. The internet archive and our sync.net. Unless otherwise stated,
today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution, share like 3.0 license.