3 Cars That Will Bankrupt You (Do Not Buy)

one of the worst cars ever made the PT Cruiser now PT STS for personal transport it turns out that Chrysler was trying to pull a fast one and call it a truck to try to raise the average Cafe gas mileage in the United States but uh it didn't work out that way so it's still classified as a car as an SUV not as a truck now these PT Cruisers were produced from 2001 to 2009 this particular one is a 2003 and right from the gate big mistake every single one of those was produced in Mexico now here's why you should listen to Scotty and not to these nuts in magazines and award winners it was acclaimed that one of the best 10 cars of the year when it first came out and they called it the North American Car of the Year now come on now you come out with a new model it's made in Mexico how can you call it the car of the year one of the top 10 cars come on now yes we do have the advantage of hindsight it's now 2019 well at least it was when I made this video in the future it'll be later but at least you'll understand back when they were making these things they had no idea how they were going to last how can you call it Car of the Year top 10 car they just started making them you got no idea what kind of quality is in them now not being a Chrysler fan even back in 2001 I didn't expect much from these things but I really didn't expect them to be as bad as they came out let's start under the hood look at all the plastic CR yes plastic everywhere it cracks it breaks look at the cheap faded bumper supposed to be black now it's white now it's more than just superficial stuff with these these engines are notorious for blowing head gaskets all the time they overheat I'd say at least eight out of 10 ones to come here with overheating problems first thing I do is use my block leak test find out yep the head gaskets bow I said just get rid of the car don't go any further yeah they look cute it's how they sold one .3 million of these Clunkers but man looks can be deceiving in this case aside from the engine's blown head gasket the automatic transmissions were basically garbage one they could barely get out of their own way even though they kept trying to make the engines a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger they never were all that fast but Americans mainly Drive automatic transmission and this car man it had one clunker transmission this particular one the 2003 PT Cruiser has a easy little fourspeed automatic it's three speeds with an overdrive on it even though they don't have much acceleration they don't get very good gas mileage for a car of this size either this particular one gets in the teens and stop and go traffic gets about 18 m a gallon now Chrysler's quality control especially the ones made in Mexico hey it's notorious for being horrible those Dodge Neons were made them they were hard this is no exception and if you ever made a mistake of buying a faster one the one that's turbocharged woo that just turbocharges the head gasing blowing faster that head gas will blow so fast with the turbocharger around them I've seen them go as little as 40,000 Mi and there goes the engine basically it comes back to pretty much a Chrysler Paradigm they often make goodlook cars that just fall apart you want a lawn ornament hey park it on your front lawn it looks cool you know but driving it every day for hundreds of thousands of miles you can forget that unless you got Deep Pockets to keep fixing it heck even the Heat ERS on these things break down they use the cheaper heater car and the stupid things either clog up or leak and you got to tear the whole dash apart to replace them and here's the part I really don't understand when this thing was brand new a base model was $33,000 more than a foror Toyota Corolla yeah back then the Corolla didn't have the cool gangster styling of this PT Cruiser but it wouldn't run circles around one of these things there you go 3 400,000 mies or more and this thing you're lucky if you get 80 or 90 before the engine blows if you ever owned a Chrysler neon you were probably smart enough to realize I'm not going to buyas replacement because the original one was bad enough they were handy seats go down in the back you got all kinds of space to throw crap in like my customer has all their junk in there it makes a big Locker good storage area but has a vehicle for Dependable Transportation this is one of the last things you'd ever want to buy now this one's got $118 ,000 miles and believe me it's on its last legs we'll start it up you can hear squeaking there and in the back you can hear the muffler vibrating they just had poor cheap Bill quality anybody in their right mind would say this is North American Car of the Year one of the top 10 vehicles of that year they got rocks in their head at least if they were honest no I mean if they're on the old poolo well what the heck a lot of people do that these days oh Scotty knows I tell you the truth about these things I have no ulterior motives other than showing people what's out there what's good what's bad over the years I've had a lot of women buy these cuz they thought they looked cute just like the minis they buy them cuz they think they look cute only to find out that cuteness is hiding an endless Money Pit under the hood 6 months ago I had a customer buy a used one and it was a convertible turned some of these into convertibles he had just bought the vehicle for like $900 brought it to me couple months after he bought it said what's wrong and there it was a typical PT Cruiser the head gasket was blowing the engine was overheating he put some of the sealer in it he bought an Auto Zone worked pretty good the bar sealer for head gas it leaks and just got rid of the thing he said sure I'm not going any further on that and you can even see looking here it's a small engine but there isn't much working room that need plastic intake manifolds they crack and warp all the time sides for and the engine head gaskets blowing and they air conditioning compressors their notorious Clunkers at breakdown after a short period of time he these things were made Mexico you think at least they have good air conditions gets hot down there you know it's like ages ago the Germans their cars had horrible air conditioning systems a hot day in dled dorf is probably like 75° now the Germans make better air conditioning systems no arguing that but this hey supposedly an American car you think they could have put good AC in it but no it was just the usual C of crap that would blow up and a compress would blow up long before their time the condensers they used on were a little bit too small so they didn't cool it down right so the compressors would always run hotter than other cars and then go out I've seen that so many times not just in the PT Cruiser but in many Chrysler products they try to make them too cheap to save money then they don't hold up over time in this case it's a truism marketing trumped engineering and Manufacturing in these PT cruises so don't be suckered by oh look it's a cute little car maybe I'll get one for my kid to go to high school in don't the engine problems the transmission problems the air conditioning problems the heating problems the electrical problems that these things had it's truly amazing that Chrysler suckered 1.3 million people to buy these things now eventually they stopped maging them in 2009 people wised up and I guess Chrysler figured hey the jigs up we can't fool people anymore they have such a bad reputation nobody's going to be buying these things anymore these SUV type Vehicles crossovers they're so popular these days to fail at selling a model that tells you there were problems and problems on top of problems with these PT Cruisers which leaves me to the old joke why did they make a PT Cruiser so it could comfortably hold five people well that's so four of them can get out and push it while the fifth person steers the car to the nearest garage this happens to be a so I'll probably figure out what's wrong I may or may not be able to fix it because they pulled out of the United States 12 years ago and getting parts for these things it's a pain in heiny it was even bad when they were here now they're gone so not exactly a smart idea to buy one but I got it cheap we're going to try to figure out what's draining the battery now you never know could be a bad battery could be lots of things so we're going to start here we going to open the hood we're going to chck the battery well first we got to take all this crap off cuz it's on top of the battery brilliant design and here's the battery we hook up our battery tester positive to positive negative to negative see what's happening 12vt it's a standard battery made in Korea cold cranking amps are 650 so we'll lower that to 650 and here we go it says suggest to replace the battery now this is a pretty new battery the problem with many testing machines is they give you a false negative this battery has only been here a short period of time it's so low because it's getting drained that it's giving it some false reading so first thing we're going to do test the charging system we'll move it over here where we can reach it Charing is perfectly fine so now we know for a fact charging system's working but the battery it still has replaced cuz it's so low which is off in the false reading there's got to be something draining this battery so going to get my hand to amp teer this does amp Bridge AC and DC then we will clamp it all the way around the negative battery terminals coming off 36837 amp draw now the normal accepted draw is points 05 and this is a lot more than that so there is a giant draw somewhere it can be anywhere so start looking for odd things things that don't work that used to things that stay on when they're not supposed to and I notice one thing this car when I shut it off it kept dinging and look the car's turned off the door's open it's dinging it should not ding until you put the key in the ignition switch we shouldn't be sitting there dinging we'll put the seat belt on so it won't ding much right now if we open the door now it's supposed to ding which it does but when we take the seat belt off and turn the car off right now everything should be turned off but we can notice the radio is still on it should not be on and when we open the door this Baby's dinging since it is dinging soon as we open the car door even without the key hey it could easily be a broken ignition switch that even though you turn it off the electric part isn't shutting power off so let's check that possibility this panel off to access things better elaters and this pops out doesn't want to pop out but it will cheaply made these a snap out right take this cover off to access the switch and off comes the top and the bottom unplug the ignition switch inside and look now the drain has dropped down to 003 which is well within parameters 05 is the most so that's it in this case the ignition switch is bad because it's acting like when you take the key out that it's still in the on position so it's allowing electrical stuff to run and that's what's draining a battery once I unplug that switch it's no longer connected to the electrical system cuz I unplugged the electric part and as you can see the drain is not totally acceptable hardly anything at all but like I said this is a Suzuki they haven't sold these things in the United States for ages so good luck trying to find an ignition switch now as you can see as we go inside here changing out the ignition switch isn't that big of a deal as right here you just take a couple screws out it pops off and you put a new one in so in this case if you're going to park it any length of time you can just take off battery terminal take it off and of course now as you can see the drain is z0 0 there's no drain at all cuz the battery is not connected and it won't drain now these clamp amp meters aren't that expensive I think I spent 80 bucks on this one it's an Interac you can use it on your house too cuz it does AC and DC you fine if you really have a short and the reason this is really good because it's non-intrusive you don't have to take anything apart you just clamp it on on Modern cars when you disconnect a battery all kinds of wacky stuff can go on it might idle poorly it might not shift right you might have to do a computer relearn this does it without taking anything apart just clamps on the wires and it can measure all kinds of things in this case we're measur meur in the amp flow now the ignition switch should not have any power going through it when you take the key out that's why I was able to figure this out so fast because just sitting there and I open the door it shouldn't be dinging right here's my Matrix look when they're just sitting there they don't make any noise until you put the key in that was making noise without the key in meaning that somehow it was being powered up now a lot of things could theoretically do it but the most common is a broken ignition switch when you turn it in the off position the electrical part breaks and it doesn't go off it keeps sending Power by the contact being worn and still sends electricity through with some relatively inexpensive equipment you can see if you got a battery drained and two probably not a good idea to buy a Suzuki in the United States I can't get parts for this thing right so he's just going to have to disconnect the battery when let it sit now this is a Knockaround vehicle form so if they're going to let it sit for 2 or three days they can just take the battery terminal believe it or not if you watch my other video on this this vehicle has 105 trouble codes so it's not something you want to invest too much money into the 2010 Chevy Cobalt and I'm going to tell you the truth about them this particular one is a two door gets pretty good gas mileage it so gets about 25 M a gallon in the city and 36 on the highway so it's good on gas and when it was brand new it was about $15,000 but back in the year 2010 when this was new for $1,000 more you could have gotten a Toyota Corolla a much better made car now as we look inside this one we can see 103,000 Mi and it's still running when we start it up checking a little on the tire pressure monitoring lights coming on that's not a big deal itself but let's take it for a spin you can hear the suspension clocking a little let's see how it takes off get some room here it doesn't take off all that bad the corner is okay it's a pretty bumpy ride it's a small wheelbase and let's face it it's a 10-year-old GM product you go down the road you're going to feel the bumps in it and there any Econ box car got plain old seats pretty basic trim you know basic little radio it does have AC and it still works and it's a typical small two door not that much room in the back seat and when we open the truck up small car but he's got a deep enough trunk there's there's still some room in it let check under the hood strangely enough for conab box car it's got a hydraulic stru now the engine itself is a 2.2 L engine that puts out a reasonable amount of horsepower it's got 155 horsepower so for its size it's relatively quick 2010 Corolla you get 158 horsepower one those so it's not running away from the Cora speed wise either it's got a four-speed automatic transmission that's a decent transmission they don't have any particular problems and we check the engine it's got a timing chain it isn't one of those rubber timing belts so it is better made so for all intents and purposes it's not a terrible car but it's not a great car either disc braks up front but when you go to the back it just has cheap drum brakes on it and you can see parts of the paint are fading away and the front head lamps are all fogging up cuz it's cheap plastic stuff you can see they're all fading away so my opinion hey you would have been nuts to buy one of these things brand new when you could have gotten a Toyota Corolla for $11,000 more and have four doors instead of two and a much better built car and that's something I always warn somebody about if they're buying a used car you got a real old inspection sticker on it be very ly personally I probably would never buy a car that had a sticker that old you never know what the underlying problem is of why it never got inspected could be a really expensive problem so you see something like that on a usth car run away don't even think about buying it so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that Bell [Music]

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 84,725

Keywords: auto, auto repair, car, car diy, car repair, cars, diy, how to, mechanic, repair, scotty kilmer, car review, bad cars, bad cars not to buy, bad cars to buy, best car brands, car advice, car brand, car brands, car buying, cars you should stay away from, terrible cars, worse, worse car brands, worst, worst car brands, worst car brands ever, worst cars, worst cars to buy, worst cars to own, 3 cars, bad car brands, do not buy, 3 car brands that are crap, worst car, bad car

Id: T1iiWkxAC_E

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2024