What’s the most regrettable decision you’ve ever made about buying or not buying a particular vehicle?

1975 TR7, a snazzy looking little sport car. Then I learned that 1975 was their worst year of production.  Everything that could go wrong went wrong. Had to buy a second car to drive while this thing was in the shop. Finally unloaded it and bought a 1978 Ford Courier pick-up which turned out to be one of the best vehicles I ever bought. 

I purchased a wonderful collectors car from two people I did not know. I paid cash and received a receipt that said, "Received $250.00 for one vehicle."  The next morning the vehicle was gone, poof.  All the paperwork for the car including the license plate number was in the car. I kept the keychain for a long time.   It was the world putting out the welcome mat for me.  

Buying a rebuilt car that was wrecked in the front. Problems arose later because of that wreck.

We bought a low mileage Cutlass Supreme back in the day. Real nice vehicle. POWERFUL OHC V-6. Too bad my wife wrecked it. 

My first car was a used Pontiac 6000.  The car needed so much work after a couple of months that I could have put a nice down payment on a new car had I been smarter.  Thereafter, I never bought another used car.

When I was 18 years old, It was my wish to purchase a 1975 MG Midget. This is not my car, but it is the exact same make, model, year, and color.

This was my dream car. The first day I hopped in with money in my pocket, the roof down, I experienced a moment of freedom and joy like never before. As a young guy with a trim body, long thick hair such as a lion's mane, hormones raging, and very cute...

I thought I was everything! I felt like a rockstar! lol

Then...the nightmare began within a month. Before I continue, it should be noted that...  

AN 18-YEAR-OLD BOY SHOULD NEVER HAVE AN MG MIDGET!!!

Tune-ups required, about $200. Sometimes the parts were not available and had to be ordered. The Engine caught fire once because the exhaust manifold cracked shooting super-hot air onto the dual carbs. Then, the king-pins wore out, Then the clutch wore out. Anyone familiar with an MG Midget knows that this is not a simple task. Because of the low ground clearance, the underneath of the car is sealed. This required the Engine to be pulled. The drive-shaft is then disconnected from the rear end, and the entire trans is pulled forward into the engine compartment. Uggggggggggggh. 

Yeah. I had lots of fun with that little guy (most which I cannot repeat in open forum LOL), but that was overshadowed by the maintenance and repair costs.

 And there was that time I fell asleep at the wheel and drove the car into a snowbank during a raging blizzard. After burying it up to the taillights in snow, I needed to crawl through my window and dig my way through about 5-6 feet of snow with bare hands at 3am in the morning. 

Did I already say that an 18-year-old kid should never have an MG Midget? *sigh*

Good Times!

I paid $6300 for a used Plymouth voyager about 20 years ago.  I spent another 6,000 keeping it running during the next five years.  I will never own another Chrysler product as long as I live.

I have been relatively lucky with vehicle purchases. It helps that I'm handy and have a fondness for cars, so many repairs others would find daunting (or would have to pay large sums to a mechanic to do), I've been able to do myself.

From a strictly financial standpoint, I leased a Mazda MX-6 less than a year before I got married and my wife went on a holy quest to purchase a house. We found making the lease payments after we added a mortgage to our financial life was a bit painful, so we forked over a tidy sum to get out from the lease contract.

From a "Well, that was just a misguided purchase" standpoint, I bought a Mazda Protege5 wagon to haul our dogs around when I already had a perfectly serviceable 1988 Acura Integra 5-door hatchback. I ended up mostly continuing to use the older car, while the new Mazda sat idle. I think we ended up trading it in when we bought my wife a new car (possibly her 2000 Miata).

It was a long wheelbase, safari-bodied LandRover, I think a Series 3.  

The car was generally in fair condition but I had failed to spot that the chassis was severely corroded thanks to the previous owner having repeatedly driven it into the sea to launch and recover his boat, on its trailer. I suppose he imagined that salt water is harmless to metal! 

I replaced it with another Series 3 LandRover, this time a van-bodied diesel, and drove that happily enough for some while until one night a big-end seized for reasons I never determined (choked oil-way?) and comprehensively wrecked the engine.

Driving home from work one day the throttle-cable snapped. Luckily I had only about a mile to go, gently downhill, so I selected low-range and first gear, and ambled home on tick-over helped by gravity. By chance I had a clutch-cable left from some previous car, and I succeeded in using it to replace the broken L/R  cable.

That vehicle had a control unfamiliar to me but which I thought was for ventilation vents, until I  noticed it appeared to affect the idling speed to the point of making driving tricky. It was a hand-throttle lever - left over from the previous owner, a fencing and hedging contractor, using the PTO feature to drive his portable saw-bench!  

A used '68 Ford F350 as a second vehicle. Truck ran beautifully through 3 engines before cancer got her, aka rusted out frame. Four Wheel Drive worked beautifully.  It was your basic truck that worked, period.

Regrettable was everyone knew I had a truck in an era of my friends having econo-boxes.  Guess who always got asked to help with a move, Pick Up XXX (fill in the blank).  My brother-inlaw was a constant abuser followed by other family members and my dad