Black vinyl roofs.....glorious. Posh indeed.

Second only to the optional extra radio that one

we had one of them, and a Consul at one point

You know I'd still have one of these today. OK so it might only do 8mpg but it'd be worth it.

Just big engines, no fuel injection or turbo's, if you wanted your car to go faster or pull more weight you just made the engine bigger, and of course even a mechanical dimwit like me knew what to do with such a simple engine when it rained and the bugger wouldn't start.

But here's a good one, true story...

Back in the day of course every car had a pretty poor record when it came to going rusty - the dads Granada in the post above would have a lovely rusty stripe down it 12 months later no matter how well you "touched up" the paint work and the underside and wheel arches of all cars were just not rust proofed at all - so all car accessory shops sold underseal paint - liquid tar basically that you slapped on with a brush that would be ruined afterwards and it dried in lumps just like the tar on roads.

At the place that I worked at we had a storeman who worked for the plastering contractors, completely mad he was and built like a brick poo-house - he bought an MG Riley, a sort of Mini derivative and kept it in the plasterers warehouse where they had a service pit for the trucks they operated.

He worked on that Riley for weeks and weeks and then one day drove it out into the yard tooting the horn and waving for everyone to come and look.

He'd added a huge spoiler on the back that stuck up above the roof, but the best thign was that he'd painted the whole car with underseal paint, not just underneath the car, all of it, with several coats of tar that had dried in lumps and bubbles, it looked like something out of the Flintstones, but as he said "This bugger'll never go rusty now".

it's the car that most sticks in my memory from my childhood for some reason, nice looking car.

He bought a what?

IIRC the "Riley" Mini-derivative was an Elf.

Yeah, you're right, it was like a Mini with a boot extension, like someone had just decided that a Mini would look better with a box stuck on the back of it.

That was the great thing about car production then - they weren't designed on computers and run past focus groups first, they didn't even have to work properly before manufacturers would start foisting them upon the public - the Allegro anyone - I learned to drive in an Allegro, its was totally s[ih1[/it, it even broke down on the day of my first driving test and the one hour lesson I'd booked pre-test was spent sitting in a garage waiting for the mechanic to get it going again.

I had a friend who bought as his first car a Skoda - Skoda have an excellent reputation these days but back in the 70s they were, erm how can I put this, s[ih1[/it, yes that will do. Anyway we were all gathered outside the Co-op waiting for the rest of the football team to turn up for a sunday league match when someone sat on the bonnet of the Skoda and it snapped in half, the car was made of fibreglass and no-one had realised until then - it had to be taped together with duct tape and it passed its MOT for a couple of years after that too.

One more ...

A service engineer of mine told me this one - back in the 1960s when he was "courting" his wife he had a three wheel Reliant Robin, they'd been out one evening and he was driving her home when the front wheel ran over something in the road and fell off, the car went skidding down the road until it stopped and he got out and looked everywhere for the front wheel, couldn't find it anywhere in the street at all.

Eventually he walked her home and then on his way back climbed over the fence of a scrap yard and in the dark stole the front wheel off another Robin that was in there - carried it all the way back to his car, jacked the front end up and HIS front wheel fell out of the space under the bonnet where it had been squashed up into when the bracket that held it in position had snapped.

ace cars, if you were driving on your own, wasn't a bag of cement recommended for the passenger seat to stabilise it?

Someone I knew had an older brother who had a Bond Bug - we used to go round to his house to stare at it in the garage like it was the most futuristic thing we had ever seen, it was basically a motorbike with fibreglass shell around it and apparently one day all cars would be made that way...

First car I bought out of my own cash was a Hillman Imp...inevitably it blew a Head Gasket, sadly it was only about 3 hours and 120 miles after I'd bought it whilst I was on my way back from Leeds to London. Boy I hated that fecking car.

If I remember rightly wasn't the engine of the Hillman Imp in the boot ?

A mate of mine used to drive his mothers and never knew that fact, he found out one day when he took it to a garage for them to look at a blowing exhaust, it cost him less than a pint of beer to have the whole exhaust changed, it being just eighteen inches of pipework.

The first car I bought was a bright blue Ford Anglia in 1964 (age 19). It was the three box type with a 3 spead gear box and windscreen wipers powered by vacuum. Going up hills in rain was something of an artform as the wipers would grind to a halt as the engine used all its power to climb the hill. So in order to see the road ahead you had to briefly take your foot off the accelerator to create some vacuum to power the wipers and then foot back on the gas before the car behind ran into the boot! Fortunately in those days there weren't too many cars behind due in part to much less traffic and partly because I used to charge at the hills in youthfull fashion.

The car used to burn a bit of oil too. It left a trail of blue smoke to most of the RL grounds, and northern Football grounds and all the way to Cornwall and back. I think it cost me more in oil than petrol. But depite its many faults I have great memories of the freedom it gave. In addition to the away sporting fixtures there were frequent trips up the dales and many pre-breathalyser out of town pub evenings and of most importance it provided some back seat romantic education. To keep the plastic uphostery clean I used some cleaning agent from Halfords and I can still recall the highly perfumed sickly smell with fond memories.

However it wasn't too long before I fell in love with a "frog eyed sprite" (the car not the holiday romance) but in order to buy it I needed to borrow 80 pounds from the bank. Despite having a secure job in Local Government my bank manager turned me down with the words " why do you want to buy a sports car?" I never forgave Lewis's bank and it wasn't long before I moved to the Midland bank which I later found to have equally unsympathetic managers.

It was indeed....at is to this date in the Porshe 911. They really should have done a Hillman Imp Turbo....that would have been fun (if you enjoy travelling backwards and visiting plenty of roadside hedges 1.85498046875:10