1994 Oldsmobile Achieva S review from North America

Alternator

Control arms needed to be replaced

Automatic transmission leak

oil pressure switch

transmission died.

I got this car for $500 and I got what I paid for. I also never really liked the car in general, and only purchased it because I needed a car and it was so cheap. Because of this I never really cared to take the best care of it, but reliability was below what I expected. The cars suspension was more horrid than that of my old 85 Plymouth Reliant, banging and clanging over bumps other cars absorbed easily. The quality of the interior materials is sub-par. In general the only positive thing about this car was the Quad-4 motor, which would put out great HP while returning great fuel economy, however it's a very noisy trashy motor.

After having the car for only a year the transmission started to become unstable and would shift hard at 45mph. It felt like a stick shift trying to shift into too high a gear at too low an RPM. Slamming the gas was would cause the rpms to surge in the lower gear giving it enough power to shift up. After a while the tranny bit half the dust, lol. It would work fine in gears 1 and 2 but that was it. It wouldn't shift into 3rd or 4th gear. Given the problems that it had and the fact that it was just an undesirable car I decided it was not worth fixing and that I would drive it into the ground. I drove it with 2 gears for 10 months before it completely $h1+ the bed.