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What's your greatest mystery experience with a car/truck?

1K views 11 replies 8 participants last post by  IanRTL 
#1 · (Edited)
After reading today's thread on unintended acceleration, I couldn't help but remember an experience that I don't even share with people .... not ANYONE.... mostly because it's just too weird (plain unbelievable - like telling someone you saw a ghost). Sort of a "Christine" moment. So I thought I'd throw out this call for "Mystery Car" experiences.... a little easier to share in the comfort of this cyber-space ethosphere we know as the ROC. Here's mine; Show me yours!!!

Wayyyy back in the 80s, I was driving a true-blue Pumpkin Orange '76 Civic CVCC. On a single particular occasion, I was jumping the car with another vehicle (was young-ish & cash-short) to get my old battery going again. And this is what happened, honest to God!
Cables are already connected to assisting car; Negative cable is connected to negative on my Civic, Civic is NOT running of course. As I touched the positive cable to my positive post on the Civic battery, the car absolutely LURCHED forward.... Yes, just as though starter engaged when in gear & no clutch. This was soooo bizarre... and I had no witnesses (was by myself in the driveway doing this). Freaked me out big time.
AND, (this part I even question if I recall correctly) when I checked, it seems to me I remember the stick was in neutral!! ! ! That just doesn't even make sense at all (No, I had not been drinking or ????). Never could/did figure out what went on there.
So there you go..... my weirdest, most unexplainable event ever with a motor vehicle. What's Yours? :act024::act018::act063::act018:
 
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#2 ·
Chevy Silverado Crew Cab - step on the the emergency brake to engage and the rear passenger window would go down. Turned out to be that the emergency brake foot lever was rubbing on the wiring harness cable and wore through the wire jacket of the rear window control wire. Engage the emergency brake and it made contact with the worn wire. To park on a hill, I had to lower the window, and THEN engage the emergency brake so that the window would go up.........
 
#3 ·
Back in the mid 80s I had a mid-70s Monte Carlo that I dearly loved, such a comfortable and quick car. It was a land yacht but had a nifty Pioneer super tuner stereo and awesome Jensen triaxial speakers in the back window shelf ROCK AND ROLL DUDE!. At the time I worked on a certain Air Force base in San Antonio, and I noticed a strange phenomenon on the highway driving up to the base. When listening to my treasured cassette tapes (Journey, REO Speedwagon etc) I would suddenly hear a unique "Wooooop" sound very similar to the noise a howler monkey makes. It would happen in the same stretch of road near the base every night, and it didn't matter what tape I was listening to.

The first few occurrences I just passed off as curiosities, but it happened regularly enough that I started obsessing about it. It was an eery sound, like a ghostly monkey was sitting in the car with me and expressing his love of rock and roll. Of course I quickly figured out it must be an EMI problem, so I redid all my stereo wiring and connections and soldered everything nice and bright --- but still the whoop would come and haunt me. Could it be a ghost monkey? Not too far away was a certain primate research center with a highly visible enclosure where you could see throngs of monkeys and apes - perhaps the soul of some tormented long expired experimental subject was reaching out to me from the other side!

Then one week I drove the same route in the daytime, and noticed that the whoop was emitted when I reached closest approach to a radar dome that was near the highway. Ah ha! The whoops were actually caused by the radar pulses being strong enough to induce a signal in the read head of my cassette tape player. I pulled over on the shoulder and timed the "whoops" and sure enough it matched up with the rotation rate of the radar. Mystery solved at last.

The ghost monkey would have been a lot more fun though...
 
#4 ·
Then there was the time that my 1990 GMC Suburban tried to kill me. It was a beautiful truck, all nicely outfitted by one of those van conversion houses - plush captain chairs, running boards, custom paint and lighting. And it was also one of the biggest POS's I have ever owned. Ran great, but driving it was like being thrown into an industrial clothes dryer full of sharp rusty scrap metal and angry cats. The squeals and shrieks and groans and rattles were enough to crush your will to live, and no amount of WD-40 or tightened screws or prayer would make the slightest improvement. The truck existed to punish me, and punish me it did.

So there I was one day, driving the fiendish hulk to a Scout ranch with a full load of family and gear. It was a nice washboard gravel road choked with caliche dust and the requisite 110 degree balmy summer morning temps. As we drove down the road, the Suburban shuddered and shook and groaned and screeched, all the while struggling mightily to maintain an icy 90 degrees inside with the rear air conditioner blasting as hard as it could.

The truck was not happy with me, and I could feel its annoyance in every shiver and jolt. The steering wheel twitched angrily with every bounce, trying desperately to dislocate my wrists. The truck body flexed savagely, letting fine clouds of caliche dust leak into the cabin to mix with my sweat into a kind of pale gray adobe crust. I grimly wiped mud from my eyes and tried to anticipate the danger, wondering glumly what the truck would do next.

I didn't have to wait long. As we hit a particularly aggressive bump, the overhead console ripped loose from its sheet metal screw moorings. The console, a diabolically cunning 6-foot-long, 50 pound extravaganza of little spotlights and drawers and switches and real wood trim, fell straight down about a full foot before it was arrested by the wires that ran to the lights. It instantly swung over like a pendulum and clocked me so hard in the side of the head that it nearly knocked me out. I actually went into the ditch and nearly wrecked the truck before I gathered my senses enough to realize what had happened.

In the fog of pain, all I could comprehend was that I had been attacked with no warning. My instinctive reaction in such situations is to hit back hard, and even in my dazed state I gave the dangling console a good stiff uppercut. It mangled my knuckles, bounced up in the air, swang over and clocked the crap out of me again. At that point I conceded the battle and declared the console the winner.

At the Scout ranch all the king's cubmasters and all the king's scouts did their best, but the console could not be restored to its proper moorings. It was cut loose and strapped to the roof rack, where a week later it was taken back to the dealer and traded along with the truck for a nice little Jeep Cherokee. VICTORY WAS MINE!

...or so I thought, until my Cherokee adventures began.
 
#8 ·
Ohhhh, man. Another wonderful Festus tale. I enjoyed it!

My greatest mystery with a vehicle was owning a Saab. 'nough said.
 
#10 · (Edited)
Well, I guess when scanning for a spot to start, I was seeing the "problems & issues" category (which seemed appropriate) & not the up-level "Honda Ridgeline" heading (not so much). If I could move it, I would. :act014:

These fall under the category of "Strange" problems & issues - any vehicle, which really doesn't fit too well anywhere (didn't want to exclude Ridge phenomenon by posting it under the "other vehicle" category). Where's your story Eurban.... I know you've got one.
 
#12 ·
Ever seen "Horrible Bosses"?

Ron White - "You were drag racing? In a Prius?!"

Jason Bateman - "I don't win much."
 
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