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 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 !
Eclipse - third generation
The 2G was great, but the next gen didn't really stood up to its reputation. Not unlike most sports cars this generation of the Eclipse had a fair amount of issues related to it's poorly engineered auto transmission. That's why all the forums are full of topics related to third generation Eclipse transmission problems. The worst model to go for is the 2001 year one. The actual problem is that the 4-speed automatic has a manufacturing defects. The catastrophic transmission failures were most often caused by the breaking of a wave cushion spring.
Now what this bloody spring does after breaking is launching itself through the filter and into the gear pump which then it causes the gear pump to break and then your precious Eclipse is totally shut down. You will not have neither forward going gears nor reverse. The transmission repair is costly and transmission shops are not willing to sell you one cheaply !
The worst thing is that this happens on relatively low mileage.To sum up, If you really insist on having the 2001 Eclipse and this is just a must for you, you should in under all conditions ask the owner of the car if the car had such a breakdown before. If the car hasn't, you bet your behind that this will most likely happen to you !
