Does anyone remember the Morris Minor 1 000 000? The millionth produced was lurid pink. Except there was more than one of them else it travelled widely, ISTR seeing them in several widely differing parts of the country.
When I was little we had a
Ford 8 with wire wheels, 1937 vintage, a handmedown from my father's family I think. My mother had another one back in the thirties, she was taught to drive by one of her boyfriends and that was that, no driving tests in those days.
It probably spent most of the War years parked up (petrol rationing) but he kept it until 1957 when he px'd it for a
Ford Popular - he was insistent that we wanted the old Roman Nose style like this, not the newfangled version.
Mother bought a secondhand one the same, then upgraded to an
Anglia, first a secondhand one then a new one. FOUR gears by crikey, even if first was unsynchronised and you had to double declutch, or stop, to engage it. By then my old man wasn't driving much, just to work and back, so he started inheriting her castoffs.
She went for a Mk 1
Escort which was a hell of a lot easier to wash, and in due course I inherited the Anglia from my father but by then although it was still mechanically not too bad the body was rotting apart.
I bought a secondhand
[url=http://www.ado16.info/images/press_pictures/187977.jpg]Austin or Morris Traveller [/url]which was newer but also rotted apart. She bought a Mk 2 Escort which was more upmarket but mechanically unsound. Then when they were on holiday in Crete they rented a Datsun and when they returned chopped the Escort in for a
Datsun Sunny which was dull as ditchwater but extremely reliable and economical.
I went without a car for several years due to living in places with a plethora of buses and trains, then bought a yellow vintage
Beetle which went for over 100 000 miles before disintegrating - in those days only Beetles and Volvos could do that sort of mileage. Chopped it in for a
Fiat Panda which looked like a Range Rover had had puppies. Cheap and cheerful, functional - but knocked up in a shed by partially sighted morons.
The only people who would give me anything resembling a decent px values was a Fiat garage and I ended up buying one of the first
Fiat Unos which was an excellent car, I kept it for about 8 years. My second Uno was not built nearly as well.
By then after my divorce I moved back in with my mother temporarily, she had a couple of
Nissan Micras which weren't much fun to drive but were very reliable and economical, then graduated to a
Mk 1 Clio a
Mk 2 and then I bought the diesel
Modus which I liked so much I kept it for 8 years. Very economical, well built, cost pennies to tax insure and service and did over 60 mpg, no wonder they stopped making them <fume> briefly owned a VW Golf Plus which friends wanted but couldn't afford at the time, so I said I'd buy it for them and keep it until they could. Nice to drive but was hard to get as much as 50mpg and stalled a lot, almost unheard of for diesels, I suspect this may be part of the emission test defeating software. So I bought the Quashqai which is even nicer to drive, nearly as economical as the Modus, and an ideal "country car" with our little lanes sometimes with grass growing in the middle, easy to pull off the road or back into a field for oncoming traffic. I confidently expect to keep this one until I die, longevity in cars is something that went away and has now come back into favour.
My longevity is another matter altogether . . .
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Happy days but I written the car off when I hit a Citroen BX head on one day,bought a Vauxhall Nova to replace it-good car but not half as fun as the mini.
I used to hold the gear lever with my knee to keep it in second gear but hey it got us from A to B and we even had a few trips out to the lakes and the seaside in it. I wasn't sorry to see it go but my toddler daughter cried when we part exchanged it for an A 40 
I cried because I had no shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet.
you told me you had it hard as a child now we find out not only did you have a bathroom with a an indoor loo you also has a back boiler to heat the water 