1989 VW Golf
First car. Well maintained. A bargain. It served us well at most times but it had one problem: in moist or cold weather the motor would turn off at random times. Usually we could turn it on again on the fly by turning the ignition key and cursing the demons that had possessed it. The mechanics never did solve the problem but over time they changed enough parts to make it far less of the bargain that we thought it was.

Anyway.

I recall one night that we were driving in the countryside to visit some distant family. It was about 150 km on dark country roads, late autumn, rainy weather. After a good while of driving, the motor started dying on us and we promptly turned it on. This became more and more frequent but there was really not much to do except go on and hope that we would make it. When the motor choked, so did the front headlights, i.e. for a few seconds we turned from an easily visible object to a pitch black thing cruising through dark space with no ability to neither see nor reveal where we were going. Eventually this happened several times a minute. In retrospect I'm sure that we freaked the living daylights out the cars going in the opposite direction.

Eventually, with some delay and a fair deal of foul language, we made it to the destination.
(spinoza, Mon 26 Apr 2010, 14:32, 2 replies)

I had that happen with one car.
It turned out to be a bad fusable link- kind of an emergency last-ditch fuse in case things really went bad, to keep the car from catching fire. Unfortunately it had cracked, so now and then the ends would be out of contact with each other and the car would become completely inert- no lights, no gauges, nothing.

Took the mechanic an hour to track it down, because I couldn't replicate the problem.
( Wanderer, Mon 26 Apr 2010, 14:55, closed)

My first Golf
wouldn't start if it rained 10 miles away - it was "cured" by bypassing the ballast resistor and liberal coatings of grease over just about everything under the bonnet........
(Purpledoris I've got afeckin' job, Mon 26 Apr 2010, 17:16, closed)