It will be moderately reliable after you replace everything. Pretty much everything has broken on my car, but I'll give it credit- most of the stuff I have replaced hasn't broken AGAIN. Some of it did though.

Real answer: 95 percent of the cars (1gs) are old ragged out pieces of shit. Find one of the 5 percent that aren't or be ready to replace and rebuild everything that could possibly wear out or break. 2gs probably have a higher percentage of non-POSes because they're newer.

And no, this isn't normal for every older car you can buy. So DSMs ARE NOT AS RELIABLE as other makes you could buy. They are a lot of fun, though.