Cars are usually a long-term commitment. Even if you’re leasing, you’re usually going to have the car for at least a couple of years. During that time, you will fall somewhere on the spectrum between adoring that purchase or feeling furious every time you think of the vehicle. But some ownership stints are shorter than your average high school relationship. What was the shortest time you’ve ever owned a car, and why?
I generally consider myself someone who is in it for the long haul. I’ve been with my wife for over five years and am looking forward to still being together decades from now. I still have my second-ever car, my 2012 Smart Fortwo, that I bought new. I also still have my third-ever car, a 2016 Smart Fortwo, and my fourth car, a 2005 Smart Fortwo. If I love a car it’s almost impossible to pry it away from me. I’m unlikely to ever sell these three Smarts, or my Smart diesel or my more recently acquired Smart Cabriolet.
I’ve also been finding other cars that I want to keep long-term, too, like my 2006 Volkswagen Touareg, my 2002 Nova Bus RTS-06, and my 2008 Saturn Sky Red Line. Certainly, it would be a subzero day in Death Valley before I let go of my 1976 Suzuki RE-5 or my 2005 Buell Lightning XB9SX CityX.
But I haven’t always been like this. There was a time that, aside from the Smarts, a vehicle in my possession was lucky if it stuck around for longer than a month. My shortest stint of car ownership was easily my 1991 Ford Festiva. I’ve written about this car before, so I’ll keep it short.
My Festiva, which cost me $500, was a real pile that had sat in a field for at least three years. There was a giant rust hole in one of the doors that had been covered up with a patch of metal from an old dryer that was self-tapped into place. One of the rear axle’s mounting points was almost completely rotted away. The brakes were also sold discs of rust, and it was so bad that applying the brakes did not scrub the rust off.
The worst was the fuel tank, which had giant holes at the seam, meaning that you couldn’t fill it past half. It wasn’t long before the gas tank return line broke off of the top of the tank, making that situation so much worse. My modifications made the car even worse still. I removed the doors and windows and then attacked the wheel wells with a reciprocating saw so I could fit bigger wheels on it. I then daily drove the thing for a month in a Chicago winter, probably leaking gas all over the place and ruining my winter coat. Shoot, the seatbelts were held in place with zip-ties. They would have done nothing in a crash.
The Festiva was, without a doubt, the worst car I have ever owned. I decided to put it out of its misery only a month into ownership after the car blew a brake line at an off-road park. That night, my friends gave it a sort of funeral by ramming it until it rolled over.
Yet, shockingly, there was a vehicle I owned for an even shorter amount of time. The crown for shortest stint goes to a 2005 Honda Rebel that I owned for less than a month. I thought I’d love a Rebel as a first bike, but didn’t, and got rid of it lightning quick.
How about you? What was your shortest ownership stint for a vehicle?
I had a 2015 Volvo V60, that I loved, for about three weeks. Bought the car because of my affinity towards Volvos and wagons. I was heading back to the house after dropping off lunch for my son at his high school, when a kid on his way back to that very same school pulled out of a parking lot without looking. Tried to swerve, but ended up hitting him right at the driver’s side front tire. Impact sent me sideways into the curb and blew the airbags. Totaled.
About six weeks. I reserved a 2021 Bronco on day one and waited patiently. I pushed out my order to 2022 to let them sort out roof issues, then waited while it sat in an arctic lot for months waiting for parts. By the time I got it, I wasn’t excited about it anymore and people were paying out the nose, so I sold it.
Couple days, but it’s really not a fair answer. I traded a motorcycle I no longer wanted for an F-150 and a Sebring sedan. The Sebring was for sale by the time I got home, and a family came to check it out for their 16 YO daughter who had just gotten her license. It was a good car, in good shape, and they wanted it basically no questions asked. I made them slow down and showed the couple flaws I knew about, I drove it like 200 miles to make sure it was solid, and then the family actually kept in touch with it and I helped repair a couple super minor things over the next year or so. They actually called me a couple years later asking if I was selling anything as their son was now getting his license and the Sebring had apparently been the most reliable car they ever owned. I had unfortunately moved out of state by then, but I did help them find something good for him.
My favorite part of that story is that literally as they drove away with the Sebring, I pulled out to go use the exact amount of cash they had given me to buy my first Miata, which started me on a long and dangerous road to having a series of amazing cars.
5 months. Last November I bought a 1994 Honda Del Sol Si from my wife’s coworker’s kid. After having a bunch of work done to it, the distributor went out and that was their last straw, they were ready to be rid of the car. I picked it up for $500 and after installing a $200 AutoZone distributor it was ready to rock and roll.
The car was in decent shape (it only had 100k miles on it) and I had visions of turning it into an autocross car. I drove several hours away in the middle of winter to get a manual transmission and some handling goodies for it, with the goal of tracking it in summer.
I never got to that point though. In April my wife discovered and fell in love with an orange 1971 Opel GT. The day after we brought it home, I knew we had to make room in the garage so the Del Sol went out on the front lawn with a FOR SALE sign on the dash. It was sold the same day to a nice kid who works at the local Ford dealership. He was looking for something cool for his little brother who was just getting his license. I think I’ve seen it once on the road since then, I hope they are having fun with it and were able to complete the manual swap that I never started.
About 6 hours. Bought two 80’s VW Jettas from someone – a runner and a parts car. I showed up, stripped all the parts I wanted from the parts car and then called a “we’ll tow away any old car” guys to come get the shell.
A long time ago I bought a rusty 356A sunroof coupe in Ann Arbor and owned it long enough to haul it east on M 59 to about I-75 where it’s next new owner lived.
A 2004 Ford Ranger. Bought it for $2500 to teach my kids to drive a manual. I had 2 other manual vehicles, but preferred not to replace a clutch on either, which would have cost more than the Ranger. Both did fairly well, the Ranger clutch survived, and sold it a couple of weeks later. For $2500.
About 7 days. I’d fixed up a 944 racecar that had incurred some damage. The market for a 944 racecar is small, but a buyer offered me an even trade for a Miata that was worth what I was asking for the 944. I traded him and had the Miata sold instantly upon posting it the next weekend. Despite never driving either one more than a mile, I can say I’ve owned both a 944 and a Miata 😀
That poor Festiva.
The metal fuel tank was a failure point for those cars around the 10-year mark. Where the cost of replacement would have exceeded the value of the remaining car.
Back in 2006 I saw an ’84 Ford LTD LX with EFI 5.0 swap for sale pretty cheap up near Sacramento. Long story short I flew up and bought it and drove it back down to San Diego. I planned to really clean it up, fix a few things, and try to sell it online for a profit, but a couple of weeks later a friend who was into Mustangs needed a car ASAP and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, so I sold it.
Bought an E30 316 for a trip to the Nurburgring. It was terrible. One thing I didn’t realise about RHD E30s is that the brake booster is still where it would be in LHD applications, so there’s a complicated linkage from the pedal to the hydraulics. Which gets slop in it over time. Which meant that 90% of the brake pedal did nothing.
I managed 11:28 bridge to gantry and sold it to a kid that welded the rear diff for dorifto fun two weeks later.
About 18 months. A couple times. I had a period of time where I was changing out cars rather often. I think it was something like 7 cars in 12 years. I’d get something that seemed like a good idea, then I’d tire of it quickly. The shortest was probably the ‘86 escort I bought. It was a spur of the moment purchase… only $900 at the time, but it left a little over a year later due to equal parts dorkyness, it was terrifying on the highway, and everything attached to the front axle died at once.
Oh wow. 18 months is long for me to keep a car haha. I’ve slowed down in recent times, but I went through a long streak where I never re-registered a car in several years. All came and went in 10 or so months.
My neighbour offered me a free Datsun 510 sedan, but my dad never got around to helping me get it running. So I guess, I “owned” a car for the duration of a conversation?
I’m still bitter about that, 22 years later.
My 97 Jetta was totaled when someone hit me, and I panic purchased a mid-level trim Toyota Corolla because I needed something and got a decent deal. I couldn’t find another Type 3 and didn’t like the Type 4. My Jetta was a manual, the Corolla was an automatic.
There was nothing wrong with it, but I absolutely hated every minute of driving that Corolla. After 7 months, I swapped it for a 5 speed Totota Matrix XR.
Basically the same car, but better! 😀
Legally 0 seconds, practically 3 weeks… Bought a car because I needed the transmission, but already had lined up who to offload the rest of the car to.
OOOF! My ex wife took the 91 Subaru Justy in less than 8 months.
I ditched the 70 Galaxie convertable I replaced it with in less than 3 months. All back in 1992.
I have won a couple cheap cars in contests and sold them almost immediately (less than a month of ownership), but the shortest I’ve owned a vehicle I chose for myself was my 996 at about 1 year. I couldn’t get it to pass emissions, it didn’t run well, had stereotypical German car gremlins, and while it was fun to drive, it wasn’t worth investing the time or money necessary to fix it up.
Because it was during Covid, I still sold it for more than I paid and came out ok.
I want to know more about these contest cars.
There have been three:
The first one was the one I should have kept. In 2012 or 13, my gf (now wife) clued me in to a contest at a local VW dealer, where they were giving away a used car for nothing. The contest couldn’t be simpler, if you were present, you put your name in a hat, and a kid drew one out, which happened to be mine. There were only about 20 people there, so it’s not like I beat amazing odds. But the car, to my surprise, was not a VW, it was a black 1996 Fleetwood with ~250,000 miles on the LT1. To this day I’ve still never owned anything as comfortable to drive. We were in the process of moving in together and had no space for an extra boat of a car so we had some fun for a couple weeks before reluctantly selling.
A couple fun stories about this car were that I absolutely could not find the fuel filler (it’s in the back of the car above the bumper like many old cars, but not many mid-90s ones!) and was standing around looking foolish at the pump until an old man took pity and showed me where it was. I also got to let my grandpa drive it around for a day when he came to visit. Cadillac really meant something to men of his generation, and he could not stop talking about how he felt like a big shot driving this rough old Fleetwood around. I ended up selling it to a kid down the street who commuted to McDonalds in it for a couple years until I stopped seeing the car anymore.
The other two were “won” together but weren’t quite free. A dealership was celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2014. The promotion they were running was selling a bunch of older used cars for mystery prices, starting with one at $14. The way it worked was all the cars would be lined up in front of the dealer, people would stand at a starting line some distance away, and a starter would release everyone to run to whatever car they wanted and sit in it. Then the prices were revealed and whoever was sitting in the driver’s seat got first crack at buying the car at that price, followed by passenger seat, rear seat, etc. We took this assignment seriously, and looked up the inventory the night before, speculated on which ones would be the cheapest, scouted their placement in the line when we arrived, and so on. I sprinted for a mid-90s Grand Am, narrowly outrunning another fit-looking guy (who foolishly wore sandals vs my running shoes) for it, and my wife went for a Chrysler 300M (forget the year). My car turned out to be the $14 one, and hers was $495; we bought both and sold each of them for a couple grand. My friend ended up with the Chrysler, which he promptly wrecked, and I sold the Pontiac on Craigslist.
2013 Nissan Leaf purchased used in 2017. Had it 3 or 4 months.
I have a 50 mile commute each day, mostly by interstate. I decided to get an electric car. I got a Leaf with a decent battery. But it just never went as far as it said it could. What started as 75 miles became 2 or 3 when I got home. The second time I had to have it towed home (after a 3 hour wait) I decided to sell the car. I paid cash, but took a huge bath when I sold it.
Replacement car: 2001 BMW 325i.
1992 Taurus SHO manual with a 3.2l swap.
The car had a crunched rear door, but more importantly, the engine swap was kind of hacked together. Someone my friends knew at that time was selling a Thunderbird Supercoupe which was enticing because we live a mile above sea level, so it was already faster and even easier to make faster further.
Think I had the SHO maybe 4 to 6 months? Basically just over Spring and Summer, then by winter I had the SC.
Unfortunately, I never loved the SC as much as I did the SHO, as I’m just not a huge fan of coupes and I think my SC was the ugliest year (94) and while I love Purple, the color shifting purple/blue didn’t excite me either. It was fast and I ended up owning it for two or three years, wherein I had the realization that I wasn’t really interested in owning a fast car, given I only went to the strip maybe once a year and otherwise had a long distance drive from my house to my girlfriend’s house. I sold that for a 94 Honda Civic EX Sedan, which I only ended up owning for about 6 months before spinning out in some snow and crashing it. That one still makes me kind of sad.
6 years, which was my first car. Since it lasted me through high school and college, it looked about 30 years old when I sold it.
Current vehicles are a primary shared car that’s almost 11, and my backup beater approaching 25 (or 73 in German Car Years). I almost have the attitude now that cars are just thing you drive until they have almost no value left, then you sell or donate.
I’ll be honest, I get completely frozen every time I go down the path of shopping for something new. It’s ridiculous — I’ll find something perfect good by almost any metric, then I’ll find out it doesn’t have ventilated seats, but a competitor does, so then I go down that path until….rinse and repeat.
There are just too many cars. I’m shocked the market supports it, but with sales prices where they are today, it’s a chicken & egg situation. People keep buying.
Roughly two weeks. I had bought a ’76 Volvo 242 from a shady used car dealer which in about a month, blew the engine. Dealer gave me an ’81 Datsun 310GX to make up for it. In about two weeks I traded the Datsun for a pair of skiis to a friend of mine – never even registered it. Bought an ’85 VW Jetta 2dr that I put 100K on in undergrad and my year off.
This doesn’t count the cars that I may or may not have owned on paper for long enough to register for friends living in states with annoying titling rules for old cars.
Thinking back, probably the 944 Turbo when I was looking for the “next toy”. Even spending extra $ for a good example, I still had to invest $5k within a month for stuff that had been overlooked. I learned what a balance shaft was and why I would hate it.
Couldn’t find different wheels, tire size was stupid, and almost anything aftermarket, if it existed, was another level of $ compared to my Toyotas and Subbies. I sold it in less than 2 years, maybe close to a year.
(And my GF loves her Sky Red Line.)
I had a 924S of similar vintage. The Porsche Tax is as real as a heart attack. The bits shared with Beetles and Rabbits were almost free, anything that had a Porsche crest on the box – oh Dear GOD, hold onto your wallet. And the most hateful car to wrench on I have ever encountered, and I have owned multiple French vehicles.
2022 or so. It needed a new air-oil separator and that alone took over a month to get from Germany, then they sent the wrong one (for an NA). We almost tried rigging the old one with Jb Weld or something, but magically the right one arrived in a FedEx box the next week.
The car was beautiful, the interior looked new. But I spent $$$$ to get it just “normal”. Someone with way more $ than me bought it, he later shared on GRM forum the exhaust and other work he did. He said “it’s probably what you wanted now, finally”.
Same with mine! Looked great inside and out, only 60K on it. I even had a PPI done on it that came back pretty clean. It was not supposed to be a project. Then I flew 500 miles and drove it home. By the time I got home it was leaking every possible fluid. The only car I have ever bought that legit got bit by the “sat a long time” thing. I spent a fortune getting it pretty sorted, then the @#$@#$ oil cooler crapped out, and as it turned out, it needed a head gasket too. Sold it to one of my BMW Club buddies who had owned a couple of them. He finally got it completely sorted and still has it. I lost sooooo much money on that car.
2007 Nissan Armada, bought used in 2018 for my wife.
One week.
Because the transmission failed almost immediately.
Luckily, the lot where we bought it had a very generous “no lemons” policy, and they traded its full cash value straight across towards the replacement they located for us: the 2008 Infiniti QX56 my wife is still driving today, which was nicer in every way anyway.
I bought a brand new ’22 Civic Si, and picked it up on the tenth anniversary of me quitting smoking. I traded in a Kia Forte for it. I loved that Civic very much, it was the perfect car for me! I was going to drive it as long as I could.
Which turned out to be ten months, as a lady in a Mercedes crossover ran a red light and T-boned me right in the driver’s door, totaling the car. Even on the morning of the accident, I had been telling a coworker about how great that car was. Very sad situation.
I had my Thunderbird SuperCoupe for one month before some jerk rear-ended it and totaled it. It was a collector-maintained survivor in amazing condition. I had salvage coverage (thank you, Hagerty!) so I got the car back, but I decided it was better to sell it to someone who I knew could get it back on the road. So after less than two months of ownership, my Thunderbird was off to a new life.