What was your first car and how old were you?

Renault Dauphine,   aged 17, 1966 cost £40. Went to Uni, drove all over the country on geology field trips. Drive to Scotland finally killed it.

I was a late starter with cars.

27 and it was a Burgundy 1.7 diesel Peugeot 305(the one with a hatch not a boot).

To date I have never owned an exciting/fast car and I drive like an old man!

Passed my bike test at 17 though and got my thrills on 2 wheels.

Passed at 24, having lived in Brum right on a main bus route never worried about it before that.

First car was a Mk1 Vauxhall Astra GTE in silver, absolutely stock including the vinyl bag in the boot for storing the sunroof glass if you wanted to pop it out! Cracking car that sadly succumbed to horrific corrosion ofvthe sills, inner arches, a and b pillars. Replaced with a Landrover Series 3,’lightweight’

1983 , 20 yrs old -f reg mini 850 traveller complete with moss in the sliding windows .a whole £50.00 .

17, VW Beetle.

Woolsley Hornet ..it was almost a classic then.. I was still 17 .£140 …44 years ago..

The 890cc engine had been swapped out for a 1300cc ..too powerfull for a just passed his test 17 yr old and it lasted 3 week before ending up in a ditch after taking the back roads home from Newcastle after a night at the Mayfair ..

I wish I still had it now ..they are worth fortunes !

Sorry double post

Red Ford Fiesta. M Reg. In 2004 aged 21. I was at uni prior to that so didnt need a car of mine – just used my Dad’s when I needed a car. Cost £800 Sold in 2006 for £800 so didnt lose any money on it.

Like a couple of others I was 11-12, I went on an outward bound course with school & when I came back my Dad had bought me a car! (this was 1969 ish) He paid the grand sum of £6 for an old Ford Popular, 3 speed with vacuum wipers etc, which I thrashed round the disused quarry next to where we lived, I soon progressed to a Moggie Minor that we paid £5 for & the trend continued……

Edit, in fact here’s a photo from a slide that i remembered I had.

The grass needs killing, I know.

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28. Bmw 130i LE.  So far buying a 3.0l engined, rear wheel drive car as my first hasn’t been the bad idea everyone told me it would be. Fuel consumption aside I absolutely love it. Practical and daft at the same time. Bike carriers on roof bars and a hatchback means it does everything I need. Makes me grin every time I start it even after 9 months. I even went to the trouble to retrofit it with an indicator stalk. Paid £5200 for it, which I think is extraordinarily good value; they seem to be increasing in cost too, which is nice!

I still like driving my dads B5.5 Passat though. It was the first car I drove, and the one I did most of my learning in.

17, 1974 Mini Clubman Estate in teal blue, ah I loved that car, shared it with my Mum (who also loved it)  wish I still had itm would make a great surfboard carrier (although my 10ft would look ridiculous on the roof 🙂 )

I bought my mates Citroen AX GT at 17 but didn’t drive it until 18. It was ace, when it worked! Followed up by a brand new 99 Fiesta Zetec when I joined the fire service.

19, and a Mrk2 Fiesta with a heady mix of the smell of Forrest Fresh Magic Tree and Opium perfume.😉

1303s Volkswagen Beetle in Silver.

DWA 181N bought on 1st November 1989 the day before my 17th Birthday for £800

it was mint original too

Bloody LOVED that car. And I would really love to still own it in that condition 😳

1955 Morris Minor with a split windscreen.

I was 19 years old! that was 42 years ago!

A friend had a Ford Anglian, soon moved to motorbikes though.

Had a Yamaha YDS7 250 two stroke, they were magical days.

This – when I was 15. Bought with earnings from my job at a garage. Barn find, cost me £15 and turned out to have a bit of a history.

1934 Singer Le Mans Special Speed.

My father thought he’d done me a great favour by selling it for me when I was at Uni – he got £40 for it.

First car I owned myself was a poverty spec Austin Maestro 1.3, when I was 24 ish. Max space for price. Which pretty much describes my thought process for every car since…

Test drove it around the supermarket car park. Only on picking it up once the paperwork/cash was through did I get in it and try to adjust the tilt on the seats, to find that was an optional extra. I never knew you could get fixed seats! Thing only let me down once when taking a lass on a first date, too many puddles that day. Had to wait for it to dry out after spraying WD40 everywhere. Or maybe it was jealous…

Gearbox was a shocking 4 speed with gears vaguely in each corner but no feeling of “slots” getting to them. Carpets didn’t reach the sides, so wiring was visible inside. No intermittent wipe.

Before that, having passed the test at 17, I had use of the family second cars, which had been bought to help smooth over the fact we’d moved way out of town and away from me and my bro’s mates.

First was a Datsun 100A, which never missed a beat but rusted steadily.

Second was a slightly bonkers Citroen Visa Super X with weird low profile solid magnesium alloys (145/50s or something!) and a rev happy little 1.2 engine, on top of which sat the spare wheel, presumably to stop it escaping through the bonnet. It was great fun, gripped well (in my head at least), but leant over in turns massively like a Citroen should do, so passengers were always petrified. I drove it on the limit at all times, as it had a rare-in-those-days rev counter in its weird dashboard, and I felt it my duty to use the red line regularly. A couple of weeks after handing it back (possibly smoking slightly) to mum, it died of a cracked block. That’s the one I miss, a weird little thing, full of character.

17 and a few months. Year 1999. £600 worth of yellow/greens metallic Fiat Punto. M reg. Loved it.  Lasted a good 5 years.

https://goo.gl/images/oVH6Eo

Was 17 (~1986), and got given my nan’s 1974 Mini Clubman Estate in Harvest Gold. Simultaneously brilliant and terrible at the same time. Who on earth thought Harvest Gold was a good colour, one from the 50 shades of crap colour palette, it didn’t even hide the rust. Can’t work out why BMW/Mini don’t have Harvest Gold on the current colour option list.

What a great thread this turned out to be 🙂 It does make me feel I lacked ambition in my early car purchases. Apart from that Alfa, I never had anything else that made every journey a voyage of discovery!

17 in 1973 and she was an 11 year old maroon Riley Elf – basically a mini copy with a boot. Had horizontal sliding windows which sometimes fell off into the car when you could get it up over 50mph and everything was rattling about. I loved it.

Austin Healey Sprite Mk4  – given to me by ex when we split up – I was 23.  Midnight Blue, BVA330J – I had it for 5 or 6 years during which time it got rustier and rustier until there wasn’t enough to weld and eventually sold it to a friend who rebodied it with a BL Heritage shell – but then painted it BRG.  It’s still going but SORN at the moment.  Was a really lovely car to drive – not a lot of power but responsive 1275. Kept a mallet in the car to hit the fuel pump with as it used to stick if car not run for a couple of days.

17 in 1988.

Blue Allegro Estate.

Somehow I loved it.

Passed when I was 17 and first car was a 5 door Fiesta which was a POS. The tyres were sh!te, I kept cutting out. I used to drive from Wolves to Walsall for work and during the winter, IF it started, it would bloody cut out at J10 M6 island and I escaped near death numerous times.

My Dad’s mechanic mate looked it over before we bought it. “Valencia engine, solid mate, no troubles at all”. 2 months after buying it, with constant dramas, we had the engine stripped and rebuilt. Which did f all to fix it. Everyone’s got a mechanic “mate” like that, who really, knows sh!t all other than how to make some coin out of people.

19. Brand new R reg Citroen Saxo 1.1. Citroen were doing an offer with £99 pound deposit and 2 years free insurance. At that age and with insurance being the biggest cost of any car I couldn’t turn down that offer to get 2 years free no claims in the bank. Sadly they’d stopped doing the same offer on VTR’s and VTS’s a few weeks before as too many were getting written off, the insurance company said no.

Reliant Supervan, I was 21 and drove it, initially, on my motorbike license. Then moved onto 4 wheels in the shape of a Hillman Avenger.

One of these at 19 though many of the panels had subtly different colours from previous resprays. I think I paid £400 for it. A failing condenser caused a sleep in at Membury one Sunday as we did not have AA cover. Sold shortly after for a Fiat Uno 70S with dodgy third gear synchromesh.

1987 18 yrs old. Morris Ital 1.7 HLS (really a Morris marina). Red with black velour interior. DFL 85Y. I loved that car it only broke down once after a service when the mechanic put the points in incorrectly. Kept it for 4yrs.

17. It was a Mk2 Vauxhall Nova 1.2 in black.

18, a Mk2 pale metallic blue Escort with RS2000 alloys and a black crinkle roof.

amusingly, a car of similar colour and age had been used as a getaway in a post office robbery locally, so I got pulled over more than a few times for a few weeks before the cops realised.

Mk1 ve golf 1.1 @ 17 perfect 1st car woefully underpowered and incapable of exceeding the inherent good handling.

Mostly learnt to drive on site in Bedford CF, TK and my favourite a scamell explorer….

Can we add motorbikes to this thread ? Rather mopeds to be exact..

Before I went to Uni, whilst doing my A Levels I had a FS1e. I went to my local Grammar and there was a small group of us that had mopeds to whizz around on.. An AP50, Gilera Trials something or other, CB50 and a TY50 (which I absolutely loved) all in our tittle group. Boy did we have fun whizzing around the lanes of rural Shropshire..

Mine looked like this: Reg DUJ1L and I adored it for the freedom and colour..

Mk1 Escort Van. 1.1 and hand painted. I was 16, learned in it and passed my test in it.

1979 998cc BL Mini, at 19 (just). Stuttered along the M1 in a rainstorm until I was told to protect the distributor cap and plug leads with a rubber glove. Mum still can’t think why she could only find one Marigold that rainy week 🙂

Peugeot 306 – must have been about 23

lived in London (zone 2) so didn’t really need a car.

bought it purely because of the RMT and the regular 4-day train strikes that made it a royal pita to get to work. was 9 month old car from one of those nearly new places.  awful car, but glad i bought it. strike as much as you like and hold the public as hostage, but roads don’t generally go on strike.

to get past 1st MOT it needed: new discs, new drums, new handbrake cable, new lambda sensor, one wheel bearing was surely nackered, one safety recall (for an electrical fire risk, not the one to do with fuel line fire risk), oh and there was one replacement stereo before the car was 12 months old… sold it at 4 years old with an ECU fault.  there was so much wrong with it, I’m sure I missed something… yeah, got thru quite a few headlight bulbs.

1961 Landrover series 2a aged 15. Still got it and it’s currently being restored.

18, 1952 ish WPD 230 was the reg Series 1 SWB Land Rover in 1976. Paid £50 for it – the India Rubber & Fabric insulated wiring was on its way out and it occasionally refused to start and would short around the radiator, the cure was to slam the bonnet hard once or twice. Went all over the place in it but mostly to the Peaks, Wales & the Lakes climbing from Kent. Fortunately petrol was relatively cheap….I sold it for £250 to buy an Austin Healey Sprite

A Mk1.5 Focus LX estate, with the shittest diesel in it. It was slow and basic and kind of labour intensive but I loved it, it was the automotive equivalent of a B&Q hammer. But I’d had motorbikes so it’s not like there was any need for speed.

17 and and an Ford Fiesta Poopular’

4Spd.  No space for head unit either.

£450 from Auction back in 1995.

Went to scrappies and picked up XR2 body and interior parts, springs, alloys, brakes, head unit and sandblasted the wheels.

So I had an XR2 lookalike that 0-60 in 5 days.  Handled great with fat tyres lol.

Insurance was another £150 but was studying A’ levels and working in Halfrauds.

Back seat was used regularly lol

First drove Morris Minor an 11,

Vauxhall Astra Van (G plate) at 17 provisional driver with Grandfather who I worked with so we were the errand / delivery guys.

As soon as I passed I was insured on dads Sierra 4×4 2.8 v6 which was ace.