Which car do you regret buying the most?

We all love getting teary-eyed about the greatest, smartest, or luckiest car we’ve ever bought, but we’d like to hear about the buying decisions that still haunt you

Some cars you buy are so good, so fun, and so reliable that you wish you had owned it sooner. Or, in retrospect, you wonder why you sold them. And then there are other cars. Those things you hope you’ll never clap your hands at, maybe you’ll keep buying them even though a voice in your head tells you you’ll regret them.

Like you, I’ve had a lot of cars that were annoying in some small way. But I can think of at least two real dogs in my back catalog. The first was a Mk2 Volkswagen Golf GTI, my first performance car and I bought one even though it raised more red flags than Xi Jinping’s birthday guest. I had enough money to buy a nice 8-valve engine, but bought a crappy 16-valve model because the extra 27 horsepower (27 PS), stinger antennas, and badges that came with the premium model swooned over me. .

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If the simple fact isn’t enough to put me off when 16 other valves are out of reach, or it’s mounted on the wrong wheel, then the complete lack of service history and confirmation A history check to see if it has been totaled before should do the trick. Imagine paying for a history check and then buying the car when it comes back broken. Yes, that’s me.

The GTI is really fast when it’s running well, but that’s rare. Often it refuses to start, and when it does, it usually refuses to rev cleanly above 4,500 rpm, which is when the extra valves come into play.

The car in second place is the 2004 B6-generation Audi A4, launched some 15 years later. It’s a smart Avant station wagon powered by Volkswagen’s crude but efficient 128 hp (130 PS) 1.9 TDi engine, which would have been a great car had we bought the manual version. But our transmission was equipped with a Multronic CVT, which was so unreliable that it was the focus of a class-action lawsuit in the United States.

Unfortunately, I was in the UK, having spent thousands of dollars of my own money trying to track down what was still an unsolved problem, when we finally got lucky and got shot. Since then, I’ve been smarter and luckier when it comes to car buying.

So which car do you most regret buying and why? Leave a comment below and share your nightmare purchase.