Your first car.....

1964 Dodge Coronet, such as this one, with the push-button transmission. It had 200,000 miles when I bought it in 1974 for $300 and I ran it another 125K. I could do my own oil changes and change sparkplugs, and I'm the least mechanical person I know.

 

Good luck changing batteries too. My 2001 Chrysler 300m had it buried in the passenger side wheel well and you had to remove the tire and the wheel well to take it out. I haven't even bothered to look for it on my new Buick.

 

My kid's first car was a VW New Beetle. I tried to change air filters. It took me awhile to figure out where it was, then I found out that you have to remove the battery to change the air filter. German engineering my ass.
My dad loved Buick Rivieras and had several of them going back to the late '60s. His last one -- the final year they made them -- had the battery under the back seat. Bullshit.

 

Loved the last generation Riviera. Progressive styling and a 3800 series supercharged V-6 that would haul ass and last forever. Shame it came out at a time when Boomers ditched luxury cars for SUVs.

 

Concur. We drove that car to Vegas a few times.

 

First car was a 1987 Chevy Celebrity, mostly gray. Had to get two doors and a fender replaced, and those were blue, while the rest had a healthy coat of rust.
The driver's side door only opened from the outside when I got it. The replaced passenger's side door was from a wagon and my car was a sedan, so it never fit quite right. You had to slam it to shut it and hope it stayed that way. It popped open a couple of times while taking sharp turns. Making it worse was that the passenger's side seat belt was only loosely bolted in and was mostly for show.
The radio had to be positioned just right to be in stereo. The headliner was ripped and falling down, so I secure it with straight pins. A couple of body parts got knocked loose and were held in place with duct tape.
It was a heap, but it was my heap. I had that thing for about seven years and drove it cross country a dozen times. Drove it on slightly shorter trips even more.
I bought it in 1996 for $200. In 2003 or so, I had gotten a new car and it was sitting in the apartment parking lot for a while so the manager politely asked me to get rid of it, so I sold it. A running car of any type can probably fetch you about $1,000, no matter the condition. I probably could have gotten at least $700 or $800 without too much trouble.
I sold it for $200. It seemed poetic.

 

I have a good friend; some on here may know who I'm talking about, who has been legendary for the utterly insane heaps he's driven all over the country in. The first one was an inappropriately-nicknamed beater (think poisonous exhaust fumes) that I rode in once -- as in one-time-never-again -- that had a huge bed of fire ants growing on the undercarriage of the car. I kid you not. He'd buy some lunk -- usually a Buick or a Mercury -- for $500, drive it until it dropped, then maybe this time spend $1,000 on the next one. Rinse and repeat. I think here lately he's gotten a newer model, but I still give him shit about all the others.

 

Just realized I've had a car for 15 years, as long as I've had all the other cars I'd driven the 15 years before. The end is near, but it's started every time I've turned the key. Other than dead batteries from music festivals.

 

1973 Plymouth Satellite Sebring Plus.
Two-door, bucket seats, console, dark metallic green, white vinyl top (just like the one in the photo but with more boring stock tires and wheels).
Borrowed money from my grandmother (yes, I actually paid her back) to buy it used, drove it my senior year in college and in my first job at a small newspaper. Had it only 15 months, would have kept it longer but...

Driving down a boulevard in that podunk town one day when I spotted a girl I was trying to date. Was turning left as I turned my head right to wave, slammed into oncoming car, totaled my Sebring. Lady driving the other car was shaken up, had to wait around for the cops. As I gave my account, I looked at the small group of locals that had gathered and there, in the back, was the girl. Laughing. No date.

 

What was it about GM in the 80s that left it utterly incapable of making a headliner that would stay intact? We aren't talking technology that needed a team of MIT engineers and years on the test track to perfect.