1996 Mercury Mystique GS from North America - Comments

Blew engine first day (not my fault screwed up crank bearing)

Blew tranny out the first day after engine got repaired (kinda my fault after putting the new engin in forgot to put trans fluid back in the tranny OOPS)

ALL WIRES ARE DRY ROTTED TO HELL.

I bought the MYSTAKE back in March of 2007, lo and behold no less that 14 hours later I had the engine torn out of the car... three months later when I finally have the money to buy a new engine I install... about a week later the engine is in... BAM trans locked up on me in front of a State Trooper... he asks if I had a car problem... I respond, "nope, I just slam on my brakes at random intervals"...about another month later I have bought the BRAND NEW TRANS. from some company in Florida... I put the damn thing in and the car won't start... the MORONS that sent me the transmission didn't install a properly working Neutral switch... so needless to say I got my money back, but I still have the trans... put a new switch on fires right up.

Car is running great for a couple weeks... then comes DOOMS DAY Oct. 16, 2007...I'm sitting in traffic and along comes a Ford F-250 with a damn ranch-hand bumper on it plows the hell out of my car... TOTALLED it is still my daily drive, but now I have no trunk space...it's a compact car.

The engine may have been the cars fault. The transmission was not. That was your own stupidity. Wires cannot be dry-rotted, as that refers to wood. You also cannot tell if they are or not because you cannot see every single wire in the car. If they were corroded, the car would not run. The neutral switch was not the cars fault. The truck that hit your car, again, was not the cars fault. In fact, from the looks of this review, NOTHING was the cars fault, except for you and what is surrounding it. If anything in this review was true, you wouldn't be worrying about the car anymore because insurance would have replaced your car plus costs of hospital bills, etc. And if you were hit that hard from behind you would be in the hospital. Unless, of course, you "forgot" to get insurance for the car also?

The transmission in these cars was a complete disaster. I used to own a Contour (the Mystake's twin) and those transmissions were made very poorly. The engine wasn't that great either (just like the rest of the car).

When the reviewer talked about dry rotting wires he did not mean the actual metal. He most likely referred to cracking and brittle insulators. These models are known to have faulty wiring harnesses.