Spoiler for size.
I had this but in orange. An 84 Mercury Topaz, bought in 2000 when I was in university and my dad thought it was a good buy from a local auction. $75 bid won this beauty that was actually driven into the auction house so it couldn't have been too bad. Well my dad ended up spending about $1,000 fixing it up, including installing a new clutch and new emergency break. It was my first standard and didn't have power steering. It had 250,000 km on it and I ended up putting another 100,000 on it before it finally died 3 years later. This included driving it out to Vancouver and back to Calgary a few times.
Then I bought my first car from a friend at Shaw GMC, got a 3 year old Saturn Ion in 2007 with those suicide doors, a 2004 and drove that up until this past fall when my boyfriend got rear ended, still runs like a charm and under 200,000km on it but the truck won't open and the insurance company wrote it off.
Now I have this:
2003 Black Wolfsburg Jetta. Love this thing. So fun to drive and it was like new when we bought in November 2016.