1990 Mercury Topaz
The 19 Things Wrong With My Car
Sean Ryan

19. It's a small space to sit in. When I first got the car, a gray 1990 Mercury Topaz, in October 1999, I felt like a giant. My left arm was flush with the door, my right arm was sitting right on the flip-up cushion over the parking brake, the seat was as far back as the car allowed, and the steering wheel was just barely not touching my thighs. This isn't a tiny car, it's only that way on the inside.

18. The right front hubcap is missing. It was missing when I bought the car. Someone gave me a hubcap, so I had all of them for a few months, but then I hit a huge pothole, which popped my right front tire as well as eating the hubcap. I never saw it again. Some pothole in Jersey City is munching contentedly.

17. The jack's broken. I hit that hubcap-eating pothole last January, so I pulled over to an icy parking lot and tried to switch to the doughnut. I got the popped tire off, but then the jack bent and the car slowly sunk down on the exposed brake pad. The jack was just damaged enough so I could lift the car a few inches before its drop. I had to call AAA to complete the tire change.

I bought a cheapo ten dollar jack from Kmart, which looked like a teddy bear's jet pack. The next time I had a flat, I realized this thing was a broken piece of junk. My brother was with me, so I asked him to run out and buy a working jack. While he was gone, I learned how to operate the jet pack, got the doughnut on, and was just in time to pay Jeff for the $20 jack he had just bought. So now I have three jacks in the trunk: one of them broken, one of them a jet pack, and one of them still in cellophane.

16. The left rear footwell was the scene of an acid bath. I put a brand new car battery there to store for a week. When I looked back there, it had spread liquid acidity to the entire carpeted area. I tossed the battery in the trunk, where it can eat through the floor for all I care. The carpeting in the footwell has now fallen away like Jeff Goldblum's skin in the Fly. There's ugly plastic underneath, with a possibility of it flat out falling away and making Flintstone brakes.

15. The roof rack fell off. It's the type that's mounted over the trunk, with a horizontal tie bar a few inches up. That bar was attached by two screws, one of which was in a completely stripped holding. I could pull it out real easy. One day driving, I got a series of blares and flashes from the car behind me. I pulled over, and there was my bar, hanging by one screw, dangling into traffic like a fishing rod off a boat.

14. Something fell off the undercarriage last year. My car's got about two inches of clearance, so I can't stick my head under and look to see where it belongs, but it looks like a cooling manifold. There's a chance this isn't even from my car, just a piece of junk on the ground I parked over.

13. The wood over the spare is rotten as hell. That piece of wood gets hauled out of its proper space every few months to access the doughnut, and then gets an awkward placement because there's a full sized popped tire going in the trunk. When I get the tire fixed, I don't want to spend twenty minutes pushing the trunk contents around (rearranging, among other things, three jacks, a leaky battery, a five foot roof rack bar and a cooling manifold), so the wood sometimes stayed misplaced for a week or two. The constant shuffling (along with some water that's gotten inside the trunk) has warped it so it's no longer flat.

12. The speakers are intermittent. The front are weak, and the back fade in and out. Occasionally it'll time well and crackle in during the end of a song, but usually it'll crackle out during a book on tape, with no dramatic effect, merely a volume loss.

11. The right back door doesn't open properly. It feels like metal fatigue every time I open the door, like bending a paper clip out of shape. I've got a feeling one day someone's going to open that door and it'll snap off.

10. The air conditioning's broken. This isn't a huge concern for me, since I almost never use it. It costs gasoline, and I'm comfortable with the windows down. It only comes into play during summers when other people are in the car, who probably don't have the same finicky nature toward wasting gas.

9. It's physically dirty on the inside. Every time a mechanic takes a look at the engine, he feels compelled to find an engine block, rub his hands over it for two minutes, then climb inside my car and touch all the seats. The passenger seat looks like a coal miner massaged it. Lick your finger, rub anywhere in the car, and you'll make a clean spot.

8. It eats alternators like candy. In less than two years, this car's had three alternators. The first one died, prompting a long ugly tow truck story that ended with the tow truck wrecking my car. The towing company fixed all the damage for free, throwing in an alternator because they had one lying around. (This is also how I got that hubcap.)

That second alternator lasted until a few weeks ago. I noticed the battery light was flickering on. I was starting off a drive to my mom's house in Connecticut, so I had no choice but to push the engine for the full three hours and see if it would lead to something more serious. The car made it to Groton Long Point, so a day and a half later I push the car for another three hours back to New Jersey, (and two more on top of that to drop my brother off). The flickering has worsened, but it was still a flickering, not a constant light. I pulled into a Sears battery center to get a testing, and it died. It's had enough practice dying so it knows where to do it. The alternator was spiking, so the battery was only sometimes getting charged. And bye bye $286 to install a new alternator.

7. The Service Engine Soon light flickers at its own will. It doesn't correspond to any of the frequent breakdowns. A mechanic I got an oil change from said it was probably an emissions problem. So I'm killing the planet. Yay.

6. The mileage sucks. It's 20 miles per gallon, which I guess is OK for a car built in 1990, but it's about what newly built gas guzzling trucks and SUVs make. I should be making twice that mileage for a midsize car like mine.

5. Insurance for the car is a 400 pound vampire bat. It's costing me more to drive per year than the value of my car. Being a young male in New Jersey, it's assumed I'm constantly drunk and have crosshairs mounted on my hood. This doesn't stop them from letting me drive; they just have me pay through the nose, mouth, and several other orifices best left to the imagination.

4. It's got revolving shoulder straps. These came and went around 1990. They got installed so people wouldn't forget to use their seat belts. They quickly got dropped from assembly lines a year or two later because they were so annoying people crashed their cars so they could break the straps. I bring a bag to work with me, and to get it out of the passenger seat twice every day, I have to lift it by the handles so the bag clears not one, but two diagonal limbo strips. Plastering the bag to the roof is not high enough to achieve this. You've probably noticed the frequent electrical problems my car has. Imagine the battery being drained by sliding that strap up and down every time I open the car door to try starting it. If I had a choice to rip out the shoulder straps or get the air conditioning fixed, I'd rip out the straps. They're that annoying.

3. The transmission is stickier than a tar sandwich. This was a major problem when I first got the car. The car would stick in first or second gear (it's an automatic, so shifting should be done automatically) and I'm driving at 21 mph on Route 1 with a honking trail of traffic behind me. I stalled three or four times, all requiring towing, and eventually a several hundred dollar repair. It's fixed now, but it still sticks on occasion, allowing me to floor it and still drive safely in a school zone.

2. It's got a massive black gash along the entire left side. This is what makes it look like total and utter crap. I was trying to get to a wedding, driving unfamiliar roads, when I realized I needed to be in the left hand lane, with a hundred feet before the road split. I made the merge, except for that colliding tow truck. He weighed more than me, so he won. I scraped my whole left side along his front bumper.

A dent the entire length and width of the car now runs along the left side. A big black racing stripe has been added, courtesy of the tow truck's paint. The front door opens only halfway without bending the fender. The left tail light is still working, but the red glass around is partially shattered. A molded piece of plastic that went around the left back corner sticks out like the luggage rack, unless it's tucked into a second broken piece of plastic. There's a scraping sound when the car dips down low, or when I make a sharp left turn.

The body damage is easily a thousand or two, and it's not worthwhile to put that in a car I bought for $2500 two years ago which continually breaks down. Even if the car still runs, I'm better off buying a new car.

1. It still runs. I had written the car off after the huge amount of body damage, and when I climbed back in it after the accident, it wouldn't start. Well, I thought, it sucks that I need to buy a new car, but at least I'm not stuck driving Harvey Dent. Then I found out there was a fuel shutoff switch that kicked in during the accident, in case the engine was on fire. The car still drove fine. I am now driving Harvey Dent.

If the car stopped working, my hand would be forced, and I'd shell out for a new (to me) car. But having it working but hideous put the decision in my hand, and I always lean toward the cheaper solution. I was trying to pick a sticking number, a dollar value at which it'll cease being worth it to fix the car. But the car got towed after the fuel shutoff, which in true highway towing fashion, cost over $300. And that last alternator replacement was after the accident (and was apparently unrelated to it). So I've already put over $600 into this horrible car, without touching any of the body damage.

I don't like the car any more. People honk at me for no reason, just to tell me that I'm ugly. I try to pass people exclusively on the left, so they don't see the gash. If I go on a date, I'll have to point the car so the girl I'm picking up won't notice anything's wrong. (the damage isn't visible from inside the car). I feel like apologizing for it at every red light.

Right now, I'm rooting for a drunk driver to plow into the car while it's parked, and give me a couple thousand in hush money.