Mine was a Ford Popular, the so called “sit up and beg”. No prizes for guessing the colour. Three forward gears only, but it was my first car. My favourite was my
second - a Mini Traveller, a real Mini, not those overblown things you see now. I loved it, although in the summer I had to have the heater on to stop it overheating.
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The Ford Pop, along with the Moggie Minor were our bread and butter when a friend and I had a spell selling cars from home. They flew out of the drive as soon as advertised.
Ford Cortina Mk1 2 door 1500 cc EHE 206C in sort of purplish deep red. Sh1t off a shovel. Bought it in 1971 and learnt to drive in it. My mum was the front passenger with full licence but didnt know how to drive as there was a short period after WW2 when full licenses were up for grabs. Passed test first time in 1971 but the cortinas days were numbered when I left the road in favour of a field.
Spun a few times but stayed upright. Very steady drive home afterwards as the only thing stopping the McPherson struts popping through the inner wings was the bonnet. Had it welded up at the local bodge it man and when driving home the car filled with smoke as the smouldering insulation under the bulkhead ignited with the wind.
Managed to stop the fire then part exchanged it a few weeks later for a 1967 Fiat 500 and what a car that was.
Had a few adventures in that!
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Mk1 Ford Escort 1975 year which I got in 1980 and had been my FIL works vehicle. Only passed my test in 1977.
Was it a rite of passage for all young men that their first car was held together by string and sealing wax and that it finished up in a ditch / field somewhere?
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Nope - the only car I took for a trip across a field was (ironically considering the forum) a 2 CV, many years after passing my test.
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Trying the fish tank test?
Yes, an important trick.
My partner said it was routine to drive all the way from, say, London to Norwich with their partners to compete at dance competitions in one or other of their held-together-with-string cars such as Hillman, Morris (if they were lucky) using such tricks as fan to stop it overheating, or one of the men driving, the other sitting in the passenger seat manually operating the windscreen wipers in the rain all the way.
In those days it was already something to have a car at all particularly as a young person.
Then competing through the rounds of the competition and sometime well after midnight after the prizes had been awarded, doing the whole thing again back to London.
With the standard cars have met since the 1980"s or so newer generations “don’t know they’re born” comparatively. 
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My good old standby was Plastic Padding especially on a Vauxhall Cresta I had. A regular Saturday morning routine.
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I am now reminded of a Triumph Spitfire we had, which also required this trick. That went through an MOT with holes in the drivers floor. 
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heater on to stop it overheating…Not forgetting to open all the windows to assist in airflow
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A heater, luxury🥶. In the Hillman Imp, the heater hoses ran from the back through the sills. There was a weird air bleed valve by tge radiator that never seemed to work , so driving around with hat and gloves, and a blanket over your legs was quite common
Which reminds of my first car, aged 15…
A friend’s father was the local head of social services & he had access to the site of the old & soon to be demolished workhouse in our town. It was a perfect place for a couple of underage aspiring drivers to be let loose - lots of private tarmac roads & a place to keep a vehicle.
Our keen eyes soon spotted a 1965 Vauxhall Cresta in a local garage car park that looked abandoned, it having not moved in a while. On asking at the garage we discovered that a local dentist had bought new car from them & part of the deal was for them to move his old car on as they saw fit. As well as it’s ludicrously bad fuel efficiency the car was unloved due to being an MOT failure; rust was on the way to endangering the front shock absorbers.
A quick trip to the dentist’s surgery, including negotiations carried out via his assistant whilst he was seeing a patient, ended up with us (in exchange fo £10) being the proud owners of a 3.3 litre car that we couldn’t drive on the road. No paperwork was ever mentioned…
Help came in the form of my friend’s father & a slightly wayward mechanic we knew. They managed to tow the non-running Cresta across town to the workhouse site. We then spent a memorable summer getting the thing to run (which turned out to be easy) & then driving it around the large site. To have a car powerful enough to spin it’s wheels with only slight pressure on the throttle in second gear was…interesting. The only restriction was the amount we could afford to put into the seemingly bottomless tank.
As well as the driving fun, girls became involved in the venture as well.
Once we realised that we couldn’t simply abandon the car when school was back in we somehow managed to sell it to a couple of blokes who turned up in full Teddy Boy regalia & with girlfriends. They duly paid us £40 (a healthy gain of £30 in 1975!); all piled in & drove off with no mention/need of the non-existent paperwork.
A couple of years later my first legal car was an 850cc 1963 Austin Mini Countryman, complete with woodworm. Although a very much smaller proposition than the Cresta it served me very well, including touring a small opera lighting rig in it over the summer of 1978. It met it’s end one dark night on the A36 east of Bath when driver fatigue & a tree caused the engine to arrive in the passenger footwell. No one else was hurt, but I have a back problem to this day that was bought on by a slack static seat belt.
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What a wonderful way to learn how to drive.
Indeed. 3 speed gearbox, with column change. That put me in good stead for the Saab 95 (4 speed column change) I had many years later.
As a “sidebar” the first left hand drive vehicle that I ever drove was a hired minibus with column change, full of drunk crew, in the rush hour, on the Paris péripherique… 
Mine was a Mini Moke, purchased in 1975, second hand from the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board purchased for the princely sum of £275.00. I drove it for two years, in all weathers without a roof. Eventually I discovered Run A Moke, based in Battersea where thereafter I bought those second hand parts I needed (not many!), but primarily a canvas roof and side panels and the folding roof struts. Eventually I made my own from lorry canvas sourced from a supplier somewhere off the Dock Road in Liverpool. I
had someone make the required bits up from patterns I made from the old ones. (I did try to make them myself - a work colleague had a father who had been a sail maker and she lent me his kit - but I was unimpressed with my efforts). I repainted it canary yellow, spraying it in my parent’s garage, the weekend of the queen’s Silver Jubilee - the new canvas roof was red. I replaced the original 850 cc engine, dropping in a 1300 and it went like stink and stuck to the road like glue. I had that car for about 8 years. I always regret selling it - but then I also regret selling the motorcycles I had - have to grow up sometime (but I still have a couple of bikes…)
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That was the model I learned to drive in! It was my mother’s and if memory serves the reg was BRM 501J - it was one of the first (or so I was told) in the UK, although we had it second hand. I remember passing my test and driving to my then girlfriends - in an effort to look clever I reversed into her drive, only to scrape the car against the gatepost. I spent a frantic afternoon searching for spray paint to match, sanding down the door, filling and spraying, the paint match was never quite right, but fortunately my parents never noticed!
My current SAAB is a high performance 3 speed automatic.
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The early Imps had a pneumatic throttle too, which used to develop leaks 