My worst car was a baby blue 1982 Mercury Zephyr. My dad drove it as our family car for four years or so, then he gave it to my sister to take to college. She graduated and bought a new Thunderbird, and gave me the Zephyr. By the time I got it, rust had become it's new best friend, and some wonderful person in Pittsburgh had smashed up the passenger side front door. So my dad took pity on me, and we went to the junk yard and bought a used trunk lid, passenger door and hood - all primer grey. Then I used a grinder to grind off all the spots of rust down the sides of the car, and painted over the bare metal with more grey primer. My dad told me he would buy me the matching paint so I could paint over the primer spots and primered body panels, but he never got around to it. So I drove it for a couple years - to college and work - with primer spots and different colored hood, trunk, and door. My friends called the look "urban camoflage." The poor car ran like crap, and drank about a quart of oil a month. It would also throw check engine lights all of the time, and I never did find out why. It ate through starter motors like they were crispy cremes. We must have replaced the starter on it six times or more. You couldn't keep the car in drive when sitting at a red light, you had to shift it to neutral or it would stall. It had a zero to sixty time of just under 15 minutes or so. It had trouble going up hills, and I would actually go different routes around steep hills.

Man, I hated that car. I hated it with a passion. Finally one day, it was time to get rid of it. The best I could get for it was $35 from the junkyard, and I think that was only because it had decent snow tires on it, and a good die hard battery. My friends and I took pictures of it as it went away, we were jumping up and down and cheering, hooting and hollering as if they had just torn down the statue of Sadaam Hussein. I replaced it with a 1989 Mustang 4 banger. It didn't fare much better - ran like crap - and quickly became a rattle trap. That soon got replaced by a Mitsubishi Eclipse, and I left my hatred of Ford products behind, never to be revisited!

In fairness to my dad, I should mention that many years later, while cleaning out the garage, I found the matching paint for the Zephyr. My dad must have bought it - I know I didn't. He probably even told me where it was, but I never listened at that age, so I got to drive the urban camoflage Zephyr.