Before I was married, one of the things which remained constant was my former housemate's 2006 Vauxhall Corsa 1.2 SXI. Bought from a family friend in 2010 as his first car, it had only covered around 20,000 miles at the time, and is still low mileage even now.
Everyone knows someone who has learnt to drive in a Corsa or owned one, as they have been one of Britain's best sellers since going on sale in 1993. My former housemate's car is a Corsa C (the Vauxhall Nova was known as the Opel Corsa A outside of the United Kingdom, hence the link), which was produced from 2000-2006. At the time, General Motors, Vauxhall's parent company at the time, was offering an incentive for driving schools where each one would get a discount on a new Corsa in the hope that every new driver would want an example of the car they learned to drive in. This increased numbers massively, and both my sister and I learned to drive in Corsas.
This late model Corsa C 1.2 SXI Twinport has been a very good car. It is sparse by modern standards in terms of equipment (no AUX input or Bluetooth for the stereo, for example), but it is very light and easy to drive, and is no problem at all to park. The gearing on Corsas was always towards acceleration rather than motorway cruising, and so this turns over just under 4000 rpm in fifth gear at 70 mph, which is a little noisy... The vague gearchange, for so many years a Vauxhall characteristic, does not help matters either...
Like cars of its era, it also has a non-adjustable steering wheel, although it does have seat height adjustment (a luxury amongst some cars even today), and no side airbags, but it does mean that driving it is much more reminiscent of older times. I drove this as a second car for many years (with my housemate's kind permission) and it never let me down once. Easy to park, with the then class-leading electric power steering, the car is cheap to run and insure, and it is not a surprise that one still sees hundreds of thousands of these still on the road.
For a first car, especially now with prices now under £1,000 even for a decent Corsa C, you could do a lot worse. Maybe the effect of that GM discount for driving schools still hasn't worn off! My former housemate is about to pass his car onto another family member, and it very much seems like the end of an era.
