1992 Geo Tracker LSi review from North America

When I got the car in June 04 with 185000, the engine was rebuilt @ 150k miles.

In Oct 04 the car grounded to a stop and the wheels locked up, lucky I wasn't too far from home, only 4 blocks, but I had to have it towed anyway as the wheels were all locked. It turned out to be a seized up transfer case as the fluid hadn't been topped up. Ended up taking the garage the does our oil Change/top ups to small claims court and they settled out of court, they paid for the repair of the transfer case ($600) as it was entirely their fault. At the same time, we also installed a rebuilt transmission ($400). So make sure you top up your fluids!

A year later, Oct 05 with no problems at all for the whole year, the car cut out wiuth no warning on the highway and this turned out to be an electrical/computer problem. Options were to either get a new computer (approx $500 I think that wasn't incl. labor costs) or have some whizkid mechanic do some magic on it for $500 out the door, so we chose the latter, I don't know what he did, some rewiring and bypassing something from what I could gather (his English wasn't so hot!) but I was grateful the car was running again!

Now a month since that repair, my clutch is going out apparently.

It was having trouble going into first gear for a while, but it didn't seem to be that much of a problem, but then recently, from a dead stop, it made an awful grinding sound when you try to put it in reverse so I had to start the car with it in reverse already to avoid that. Anyway, so that's being repaired for $380.

Hopefully that's all that's going to be wrong with the car for another year at least!

I got my last 2 repairs done by a very honest friend who gave me honest prices for the work.

Even with all the recent problems, I love my geo tracker for all the same reasons everyone else states;

-Easy to park.

-Extremely fun to drive with the top off.

-Is peppy in low gears, can go when it wants.

-We once drove a couch home from from Ikea with it tied securely over the back like a mini pick up!! Great for throwing stuff in the back when the seats are put down. Groceries, bikes, furniture. Very practical design!

-Also, I love the fact that I don't have to worry about locking it anywhere, it's a convertible, if they want to get it, its not too difficult so instead of smashed windows and slashed soft tops, I just never ever lock it up!

I believe it has personality, can't believe they stopped making them. Am definitely looking for a newer one as this one has served me very well, but has a lot of miles on it.

I'm definitely hooked on convertibles now, was thinking of a Mazda Miata as my next car, but the lack of space and practicality brings be back to my trusty Geo Tracker!

Someone also mentioned is that lack of security does mean you can't have anything you don't want stolen in the car so its easy to solve that situation, just never leave anything valuable in there! I have an ipod which I hook up when I get in the car and take away when I park which works really well.

Someone did steal our broken CD player earlier this year, but no hard feelings as it was broken anyway!