The process of buying a used performance or sports car should not break your budget. We are lucky to live in times when one can easily find a sports car that is both affordable and reliable. Japanese sports cars for instance can offer great reliability, decent performance for the price and best of all they don't cost too much on to buy either. On the other hand luxury cars like Lexus, Acura and BMW can cost more when they are new but once they hit the used market their prices rapidly plummet down.
Which is when we have the opportunity to get the better side of the bargain. Unfortunately for us unlike regular family sedans most sports cars usually require a lot more maintenance and their repairs are much more costly. Let's face it you wouldn't drive your compact SUV like a lunatic just to prove to your fellow Mustang owner that you are faster than him ? In fact you will most likely car for it for it, more than you care for yourself.
Of course this leads us to the bad sides of owning a second hand cool sports cars. One is the usually higher car insurance the other one is the condition of the car. No one buys a sports car to get from A to B, and most of them are beaten up hard. Some cars handle that with ease ( sub 2000 Mercedes cars and Volkswagen) and some just don't.
Here is our list of used badass sports cars you should avoid at all cost !
The Honda Prelude 5th Gen Automatic
Oh Honda, you should have known better. I personally never liked the prelude, it was just too ugly to look at, but that is just my personal opinion. Let's face it the Prelude was never one of the JDM Honda cars. The 5th Gen Prelude had a few more serious problems to address than its styling ques.
Just like the Eclipse, the Prelude's weak spot was the 4-speed automatic transmission. Even some owners that had 5-speed manual had issues with grinding noises and vibrations. But this is just an inconvenience compared to the failures of the 1997-1999 automatic. The whole gearbox was poorly executed and it will surely fail if it's not looked at properly. There are several extensive topics in preludezone.com covering this very issue. It all comes to how much effort did the previous owner put into looking after the car.
If you really want to be that dude with the Prelude, you should go for the Manual and exclude the 1997-1999 models from your list !
