In 1982 I bought a luxurious and sporty 1980 Pontiac Phoenix. It may well have been the worst car I ever owned. But my Phoenix’s many dimensions of awfulness provided hooting entertainment for my friends, and valuable lessons in humiliation and disappointment for me.

The 1980 Phoenix, to remind you, was one of GM’s promising front-wheel-drive X cars, downsized but feature-laden compacts designed to cope with a recent “energy crisis.” Gasoline had hit a shocking .70 cents a gallon.

I bought my Phoenix second-hand for $3,000. It was the first car I owned that had power windows, let alone power seats, air conditioning, and a sunroof. The back half of the roof was a padded-vinyl “landau” treatment, giving a sporty touch. Believe me, it was a big step up from my previous car, a 1975 Pinto. I was 30 years old and about (I thought) to get married. The Phoenix looked like the kind of staid but comfortable car that I believed married people were supposed to want.

Like a bad marriage, there were problems from the start that I should have seen coming. The first time I drove it, the engine stalled when I made a hard left turn from a stop light. I though it was a fluke. It wasn’t. The power steering pump drew so much juice from the engine that the carburetor couldn’t cope. I adapted. I coped. I either avoided hard turns from a stop or prepared the way a one-legged man does when about to get out of bed.

Electrical problems became a constant companion. We always stalled at least once on startup, because the Phoenix wanted to remind me who was boss. The whole warning-light array would come on while driving on the highway. That was the Phoenix telling me it was in a very bad mood. The engine then started quitting anytime, anywhere. In six months I was towed to a AAA garage seven times. The garage guys and the dealer all tried their hand at extensive under-hood rewiring. Every repair cost about $300 and worked for at least a week.

The snazzy pop-up sunroof started leaking whenever it rained. The dealer wanted $150 for a new rubber gasket. To heck with that. With a bead of my trusty Eastman 910 adhesive, later made famous as Krazy Glue, I sealed it shut forever. Well, almost.

Any form of self-service turned out to be beyond my abilities. The oil filter, about the size of a baseball, was hard up against the firewall and inaccessible to an adult with normal-sized hands. The battery (I needed three in two years since power-draw was constant even when the car was off) was bolted on at its base, requiring a 12-inch wrench extender, then a rare commodity. Once you undid those bolts, guiding them back in was like steering the Moon Rover from Houston.

One night in lower Manhattan, I hailed a Yellow Cab. Not for a ride, but to get a jump start for the Phoenix. As the engine cranked to life and we undid the cables, a small fire started in the engine bay. I let the hood drop, jumped in the cab, and rode up to Grand Central. The next day AAA hauled away a Phoenix that would never rise from the ashes.

In 1983 I interviewed at Consumer Reports. During my chat with then Editorial Director Irwin Landau, I asked if CR’s autos department had noticed anything screwy with GM’s 1980 X Cars. He directed me to the September, 1979 edition when the magazine had tested four of them. They had averaged 22 defects which turned up during testing. Among them: repeated stalling, stuck automatic choke, a new carburetor needed for the Phoenix, a loosely bolted torque converter that damaged a starter, and a refrigerant hose burned through by coming in contact with the exhaust pipe.

Lesson learned: I should have been a subscriber before I bought this nightmare.

--Gordon Hard