Plan B Forum

1965 Chevrolet Impala 4-door with a 2-speed hydra-glide and a 283 cu in V8!

My late father took some 8mm movies of me behind the wheel!

1959 Ford Anglia, I had two, one for spares.

1976 Buick Skylark. It was my dad's the first (and last) new car he ever bought. This isn't the actual car, but it is one I found in the same colour.

196x Morris Minor. I failed my test because it had those pop up indicators on the B pillar. The test Centre in Wellingborough Northamptonshire was by a park with no pavement (sidewalk) and a very thick hedge and a sharp left turn. I went too close to the hedge and left my indicator in the greenery. I still remember my driving instructor's look of disgust as he fetched his broken indicator out of the hedge. I was literally ten yards from the test Centre. I had to do hand signals all the way and needless to say got flustered with predictable results.

Same as dales', actually, with the same 283 V-8 and the automatic tranny.  It was my Dad's car at the time and was the car I used to take my 'behind the wheel' road test.
(as an aside, I also think it was the first car he owned with an automatic; up until then he had always been a straight-stick, 'three-on-the-tree' man.  It wasn't until years later that I finally taught myself the fine art of putting a car in gear and letting out the clutch without stalling the engine, spastically lurching forward, or grinding several thousand miles of service out of the clutch itself.)

-"BB"-

I took Drivers Ed in a stick shift, '61 Chevy Biscayne. However, I took my drivers test in the family's '60 Ford Country Squire station wagon, so that would be the car I drove when I was first licensed.

A reasonable facsimile thereof:

1978 Datsun 510 Station Wagon. Since I passed the first try, I had my license when I drove home, and it was also the first car I solo'ed in a few days later when my Dad had to be rescued when his car blew a radiator hose. The car was totalled 5 months later, but I still have the driver's seat, which we gave to a friend with the same model car. Which he sold to use a year later, and I still have that car.

1978 Ford Fairmont station wagon, though I took my test in my uncle's F250 pickup.

'47 Ford 2-door sedan, V8, 3-on-the-tree. Soon after I took the test, the Ford was traded in on a 52 Dodge with a 'fluid drive' auto tranny

My mom’s car, except ours was a 82 or 83 I think (or maybe that’s just when we bought it) and a tan color.



My dad took it to fill up one day and wasn’t thinking so put a few gallons of gas in it - the guy at the station said ‘no worries’ so my dad didn’t drop/drain the tank. It never ran right again and my mom finally got rid of it in 91 when she assumed payments on my Mazda 323 that I gave up when I moved on campus. My father was pissed that she was driving a ‘Jap’ car, but it was the most reliable vehicle she’d owned since her VW Bug.

Depends on how you look at it either an 86 Ford Tempo or an 87 Mustang. The tempo was my moms car the mustang was "my" first car.

The car I actually passed my test in was a 197x Vauxhall Viva which was popular at driving schools because it was supposedly easy to drive.

The car I first soloed in was a 1963 Ford Cortina (big brother of Gob's Anglia above) which I bought for £18 and sold, 18,000 miles later, for £35. It had 85,000 on it when I got it and my GF at the time, who had passed her test, rode shotgun for me. That below is as close as I can get to the color.

I missed a chance to make a fortune with that car. In Britain, unlike the US, the car's registration plates stay with it and go to the new owner when it is sold. You can take the plates from one car and transfer them to another vehicle if you own both, but it's costly and only for the rich who want vanity plates. So there is (or at least was, because the law may have changed) a thriving market in unusual plates. So if you wanted DJT 1, for example, you would find the poor pleb who owned this on his beaten up Mini, pay £10,000 over the odds for it, pay another wad of cash to the government, and transfer the plates to your Rolls. The plate on my Cortina was 40 BTH - a wholly unremarkable number of no value. Until filthy rich hotelier Charles Forte (pronounced 40) decided to take over a middle of the road chain (think Best Western) called British Trust Houses (BTH) and rename it TrustHouse Forte. If I had been quicker off the mark I would have driven the car up to London and I reckon I could have sold it to Sir Charles for £500. I think it's about #17 in my list of Top 20 Things I Wish I'd Done To Make More Money.

For me, it was a 1968 AMC Ambassador (but ours was blue):

ex-khobar Andy wrote:The car I actually passed my test in was a 197x Vauxhall Viva which was popular at driving schools because it was supposedly easy to drive...

My father owned one and used to say of this car... I Vauxhall the way there and Vauxhall the way back. However, reading about them over the decades since I get the impression they were a fairly reliable car company.

The first car I tried driving, and the car I took & passed my driving test in (in 1963), was my father's 1960 Ford Galaxie 4-door hardtop sedan—the first new car he ever owned. It had an automatic transmission, but not much else in the way of fancy options (no power steering (!!!), brakes, or windows). A few years later, when my father bought himself a 1964 Fairlane, it unofficially became "my" car (though my father never signed over the title) and later each of my two younger sisters took possession of it. It was thoroughly rusted out long before my family finally junked it, sometime in the '70s.

But the first car that was really mine to drive whenever and wherever I wanted was a 1953 Plymouth 2-door with a stick shift which my father bought for me for $25 (no, that number is NOT missing any zeroes) shortly after I turned 16 and months before I took Driver Ed and got my license. (I drove that for a little over a year before I crashed it and we junked it.)

My Parent's 1961 Chevy Bel Air. Same color as this one. It always stalled when it was cold and the muffler would pop loose anytime I floored it. I remember the radio had to warm up before it would play. Once, when a friend tried to roll down the window in the back seat, the glass just slipped down into the door and stayed there. Oh yeah... and another friend burned a hole in the back seat while smoking a joint and the only thing we had to extinguish it was pickle juice from a jar of pickles that was in the car for some reason. The first car I owned was a 1972 Super Beetle.

Econoline wrote:... But the first car that was really mine to drive whenever and wherever I wanted was a 1953 Plymouth 2-door with a stick shift which my father bought for me for $25 (no, that number is NOT missing any zeroes) shortly after I turned 16...

In today's dollar$ that $25 would be equal to $200 in today's money. Still, that price was not to bad for a ten year old car even though they depreciated much quicker back then.

'69 Skylark



A good car - drove well even when pieces fell out from the engine compartment. Was a devil to beat at a red light because I didn't care if it got dinged.... in 1979

'68(ish) VW beetle

It looked pretty much just like this, although the backdrop is very much NOT where I lived!

License? We don't need no stinkin' license.

The first car I ever drove was my mother's 1957 English Ford Squire. I was nine. The car was three. My uncle, who lived in DC, visited us while on his way to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco where JFK was nominated. He decided that I should be able to learn to operate the clutch and steering wheel. (I'd been shifting the 3-speed on the floor for two years while Mom did the clutch and steering.)

http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/19 ... d-enduring Hers was black.

The car I took my driver's test in was my parent's 1962 Rambler Ambassador. 327 CID 250 Hp 4-bbl V-8. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... reen-f.jpg Theirs was white.

I got my restricted (to and from school and agricultural errands for parents, daylight only) license two weeks after my 14th birthday. I drove to school on the last day of the year in my 1931 Chevy truck that topped out at about 30 MPH. I'd dug it out of a collapsed shed the summer before, and got the truck as payment. It had last been tagged in 1948. There was no student parking at the Jr High, so the faculty was somewhat upset that I used the only area available, theirs.