Well, I thankfully have a couple of GOOD stories where I bought cars and motorcycles on line from out of state, then found them totally acceptable when they were finally delivered to my house. But you are I guess asking for bad car stories.
When I first got married, my wife and I had nothing. Our net worth was well below zero, and we couldn't even blame it on student loans. But I had a car that was in serviceable condition, so we were OK transportation-wise. Until I got transferred and there was simply no way that I could get to work and my wife could get to work and school with one car. So we looked for something cheap but OK.
Well, my wife is Italian, and she saw a cute little red Fiat 850 Spider sitting on a used car lot near where I worked. It was one of those lots where a guy just has a bunch of cars to sell; nobody actually worked there, but if you saw something you liked, you just called him up and went for it. Of course, everything was AS IS (!).
The car drove Ok, so we bought it, maxing out our MasterCard. On the way home, the car crapped out. Wouldn't run. Nothing. We took it to a garage, and they charged us a couple hundred dollars to do something to it (I forget what), and as we were driving away, the mechanic said that we had a "rust problem" in one of the fenders. He wouldn't even drive it in the condition it was in.
So we took it to a body shop to have the rust repaired, paid a couple hundred more dollars for that, and ended up back at the first mechanic for something or other. He asked why we didn't get the rust taken care of. Oy woy! it turned out the body shop took one look at the left side, saw that it was for shit and fixed it, but the right side was worse and they didn't touch that.
And on and on.
Well, when we moved back into Pennsylvania (where we have state inspections), I took it to the local Fiat dealer to get it inspected, and they told me frankly that they WOULD NOT PUT A STICKER on the car under any circumstances. being candid, the service write up guy told me that the cars were SO prone to rust that none of their mechanics would sign the inspection, out of fear that the car would "fail" and they would be liable. And it was only 4 years old!
Which is, basically, why FIAT was thrown out of this country for 30 years.
I ended up selling the car to a guy I worked with. he was going to give it to his son as a "project." I got $50 dollars for it. I only owned it for about 6 months, and put less than a thousand miles on it. Most of the 6 six months was spent in one repair shop or another.
The worst automotive ownership experience of my life. Which is saying something.
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