jujube
SF VIP
My father had an old Chevy station wagon that he painted what was supposed to be "pearl grey" and turned out to be "blinding silver" (there was NO WAY he was going to spend $29.95 for an Earl Sheib paint job when he could do it himself for $3 worth of paint...no siree...). That car was the bane of my early teenage years. We called it the Silver Streak and prayed that none of our friends saw it. I would have him pick me up around the corner from school so that no one would see me getting into it. I post on a Facebook page dedicated to my graduating class from high school and mentioned it once when we were discussing old cars. I was surprised when several people mentioned remembering riding in it, mostly the boys who were in my dad's Boy Scout troop. I guess you don't forget riding in a huge silver bullet.
Our other named car was a 1970 Mercedes 220D that my parents picked up from the factory in Stuttgart and had shipped home. All of my sisters learned to drive in it and all of them wrecked it to some degree or the other (including one brother-in-law). We inherited the car when it wouldn't run in cold Indiana winters any longer and brought it down to Florida. It was a flake of rust on four wheels but dammit! it was a Mercedes and it didn't have to make excuses to anyone. We alternately referred to it as "Eva Braun" (it was brown) or "Der Ault Kraut". It finally gave up the ghost for good at about 350,000 miles and we sold it to our mechanic, who put in a gas engine and used it as a demolition derby car. A fitting end, I should say....