Been driving for 17 years now, and I'm on car #5. First was an 80 Buick Skylark that my friends insisted I make a skater car - which means filling the thing with garbage, covering entire windows with stickers, burning the upholstery with cigarette lighters, and removing the headliner to put up an Anthrax poster. It was high school and I had a mullet, what can I say? Next up was an 81 Oldsmobile Omega, which was just like the Skylark except it had 4 doors. Drove that thing for a few years, until the vacuum system started to go, making it take like 30 minutes to start the car without stalling. On a road trip from Colorado to Washington, it did just fine, but on the way home, the exhaust system fell off, the speedometer cable broke, the hood latch failed, and a couple other things went wrong. Sold it to a junkyard for like $200, and bought an 80 BMW 320i with no transmission. Added a tranny, and replaced the dashboard, sunroof, upholstery, and most of the engine myself. Just before I got a chance to take it in for a paint job, some crazy old woman t-boned me a block from my house, totalling the car. Fortunately the insurance settlement was enough to get me another BMW 320i that actually had paint on it. I drove that car for years, and it was fucking solid. The starter was blown, but I took that car with me to Portland, and then down to Texas. Finally, the starter got so bad that it was making me late, and I found out that getting a new one put in would cost more than the value of the car. So I sold the car to a scrap metal dealer for $36 (that's all I could get for it). The car had well over 300,000 miles on it, and it stalled on the scrapyard's scale and would not restart.
Anyway, now I have a 94 Volkswagen Jetta. It gets about 30mpg. But I bicycle so much that I only have to put gas in once every 2 months. Just got the rear brakes replaced yesterday. I'll probably keep this car for awhile.
Oh, and I hatehatehatehatehate to drive. I wish I didn't have to. But I do - here in America, for those of you who don't know, most of us could not do important daily things like grocery shopping or going to work without a car.