The first car I had was a piece of shit that looked like this:
http://bestsellingcarsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Ford-Taurus-USA-1992.jpgIt was a piece of shit largely due to the previous owner being one of those people who moves a car title from state to state until the fact that it was pulled out of a lake and had had its odometer roll over at least twice falls off its record. I scrapped it because it kept breaking in insane ways. Also I kept running it into things because it had such an incredibly large blind area on both the front and back. But the trunk (or boot if you're British) was really huge. It's deceptively small looking, it's actually really really big.
The second piece of shit car I had looked like this:
http://www.cardomain.com/ridepost/5471610/10108652/2004-chrysler-pt-cruiser/It was a piece of shit largely due to its having incredibly poor gas mileage. I was lucky to get 27 mpg highway (11.48 KM/L, 8.71 L/100KM), and usually got about 20 mpg (8.5 KM/L, 11.76 L/100KM) city. Seriously, the other POS clunker got higher mpg than this one. Then there was also the time that I was on a hill and it stalled and a little light came on. I pulled out the manual, and it said that to step away from the car because either the engine was about to blow up or the engine was a little short on oil. That's an incredibly varied set of outcomes, and I felt like they could have had two separate warning lights for those two problems. Acceleration was crappy, it was bad in just about every kind of environment (spun out, couldn't go up hills, couldn't slow down evenly going down hills, didn't like starting in the cold). It did have heated leather seats, which was really nice in the winter when I got it. Then the first day of summer came around, and I immediately noticed a problem. Namely, I had to turn on the car and run the AC without sitting in it because the seats and steering wheel tried to burn my skin off. So I immediately had to go buy a steering wheel cover and beaded seat covers. It was hard to keep clean because there were so many little crevices, unlike the other car that seemed like it was built for a murderer in that the trunk was easily large enough to store two adult bodies and the car had no hard to reach little crevices where evidence could hide.
In short, don't buy either of these cars. I don't have any advice on what a good alternative would be, but neither of these is any good at all.
Topic: Pics of your dream car