Buyers guide festiva

[rudegar]

What should I look for when buying a festiva? ANY specific problems with this cars i should look for?

[project b6t]

meh besides what you would look for in searching for any car (smoke, dents, ext..) a festiva is pretty straight forward. the engine is to simple to have any thing special go wrong with it.

only thing i have noticed is that wheel bearings seem to go after a couple 10k miles specially if you go over 60-70 allot :roll:

[Silv3rBull3t]

Yeah the wheel bearings seem to be very common problems actually...

[Safety Guy]

Especially the rear wheel bearings.

Also check for rust in strut towers and corrosion on hard brake lines.

Then do the usual stuff you'd do for any other cars.

Karl

[BossMan]

Yes...watch the bearings, especially the rear. They do go bad quite often surprisingly. ALSO...make sure they have the Brass locking nuts on them with a notch punched into the well. MAKE sure you don't have some POS fiber filled nut like mine had (Didn't catch that until it was too late). I drove to San Antonio from Wichita KS (^%) miles one way) and about 30 miles from San Antonio, my drivers side failed and the rollers pretty much melted onto the spindle. Not good. Check your bearings often.
I have the old spindle and it makes for a cool paper weight now.

[gdawgs]

I hear about wheel bearings going out often, but either I'm lucky or all of you are unlucky.

On my first Festiva, it logged 300,000 miles and never needed a rear wheel bearing replaced. I did change out the front passenger side one somewhere around 225,000. And I did a ton of 75mph interstate driving with this car.

My current Festiva has just about 130,000 and I've never replaced any of them.

My dad has one with about 160,000, and he has never had to replace one either.

The things I have replaced often are mufflers and CV joint boots. Other that that they pretty much just go forever.

[ericsmith32]

My dad and I has never had any wheel bearings go bad.. *knocks on wood*. The one thing I would check is the exhaust. The 91 exhaust seems to be worse of all the years we've had. Look at the front driveline.. tie rods, steering rack boots and ball joints. If any of those don't look like they been replaced.. do it.