My old Fiat Uno Mille
I always drove old cars in Brazil, not because they in style, but because newer cars were (and still are) prohibitively expensive to most Brazilians. And I mean "old cars" in the sense that it's something that people drive everyday and barely do any maintenance, and not some cool muscle car they baby it up and keep in pristine conditions.
My father is a mechanic so, naturally, he would buy cheap beaten-up cars to fix and later resell at higher value to make some money. Except that sometimes he didn't do that, he would just keep the car around and use it for low-stake jobs, like transporting dirty engine parts from one place to another. We would always have 2 or 3 cars at our disposal because of this — a luxury, to be honest.
This Fiat was one of the worst he ever bought, in the early 2000s. It was a Fiat Uno Mille from 1984, a few years older than me, that used ethanol made from sugarcane as fuel1. When my father bought it, it had no handbrakes and the normal brakes would lose pressure after a while, so if you didn't pump it from time to time, they wouldn't work. I still drove it daily like this until it was fixed.
It had no a/c, no power steering, no ABS in the brakes, the lights were almost useless at night, the windshield became foggy when it rained with barely any visibility. On the highway, when it hit 90 km/h (that's kilometers per hour, for the non-SI people) (yeah, games using kph are using the wrong terminology), everything started to vibrate violently. When it hit 120 km/h, the vibration stopped and the car felt like it was gliding on the asphalt. I used to say it was phasing out of existence at that speed, and my friends used to call it "Uno da morte" (something like "Death's Fiat") because you were defying death when riding it. Sometimes I would joke and ask if everyone had life insurance before going in.
This Fiat is the car I drove the most in my whole life, 5 or 6 years in total I think. It felt almost as an extension of my body, to the point that whenever I get into any newer car nowadays, it feels weirdly disconnected from the environment around. With this Fiat, I knew how much I could push it and how it would react under bad conditions. Newer cars have so much technology that you have to be more technical, it can't be based on "feel" anymore. They are more comfortable, but sometimes you need to "know" what's going on instead of relying on lights in the panel. At least, that's how it is for me.
To get the car started, it was like starting a spaceship or some dangerous machine: pull the choker just the right amount, step on the brake (even when the handbrake was working, it was not great), then step on the clutch (automatic transmission is for rich people only), turn the key and start accelerating. If you did everything right, it would start on the first or second try. If you didn't, it would flood the engine and make things more difficult. Since it used ethanol as fuel, and ethanol doesn't like to explode when it's cold (like, 10 ºC or below), we had to put a bit of gasoline directly in the engine manually, just for the initial kick.
Once, I think the battery was drained, so I just pushed the car a few meters, jumped inside and did all the above while it was moving, which brute-forced the engine bypassing the starter (as far as I know, because I'm actually very ignorant about how cars really work).
You might be thinking "Didn't you say your father is a mechanic?" and, yeah, he is, but I never cared about cars and he did the bare minimum to keep this car working. Once, while driving, the driving shaft disconnected from the transmission (I guess), so stepping on the gas did nothing. It was, like, 11PM and, since it was a downhill road, I just rolled the car over an empty lot, locked it and went the last 3 km home on foot, returning the next day with my father to reconnect the things. It happened at random two more times after that. Such is the way of life.
The best thing about a car like this is, as long you are a conscious driver and isn't driving like crazy and putting people's life in danger (I knew how much I could push the car, but only did so in safe and ideal situations), you don't have to fret about taking too much care of it — just change the fluids at appropriate times and see if the tires are ok, then everything should be fine. Being an old Fiat, and a very popular model, parts were dirty cheap, and the car's body was already busted enough that nobody cared.
Here's the only picture I have.
In Brazil, this is common and cheaper than gasoline, although not as efficient. In ye olden days, cars were either gasoline or ethanol-powered, but nowadays most engines can take either fuel — from the same tank, mind you. When you talk about "hybrid vehicles" with Brazilians, they sometimes first think about ethanol-gasoline engines (also known as "flex vehicles"), not gasoline-electric. Diesel is forbidden on smaller vehicles, reserved only for large trucks and heavy-duty machinery.↩