My neighbours probably felt the same with my Mk1 till I replaced the engineā¦ 
Ah yes. Back in 1985 bought a 4 year old MG Midgetā¦scrapped after 18 monthsā¦terminal rust and busted engine/gearbox.
In 72 I bought a well-clapped 1965 Corsair as a stop-gap while I looked for a decent car. The strut-tops had been brazed, not welded, and amazingly there was no rust on the rest of it.
However, the paint was faded, the engine was shot, the column-change gearbox jumped out all the time, the exhaust was blocked by all the oil being burnt, the driverās seat had collapsed, and the brakes were dangerously useless, even with new pads and shoes. BUT, NO RUST, maybe it was worth thinking about doing something with it.
Fortunately, a guy at work had a couple of wooden crates full of an engine in bits sitting in his garden, and the local scrappy had a floor change box in a well-dented Mk1 Cortina. And I had the brake servo rescued from my old Humber Hawk.
The engine turned out to be a 2737E push-rod Kent that had only been used in the early Formula Ford, and it came with all the right accessories (Weber carb, manifold, banana bunch exhaust, blueprinted, trick internals, etc), the gearbox was letter-punched with L O T U S (I never noticed the green stripe on the muddy battered side when I took the gearbox out), and a nice new straight-through big-bore exhaust for a Capri GT completed the assembly. Outwardly the only give-aways were the 185 tyres on the 5 1/2 J flat-ledge rims (from that Cortina) and the fat exhaust.
I did more than 70,000 miles in that rocket over the next eight years (with occasional minor welding underneath) before the shackles on the back end of the leaf springs began to terminally buckle the chassis rails under the boot. Last I heard, the engine and box still live on in a former work colleagueās Caterham.
That was really, really cheap motoring, a blessing when I was totally skint with a crippling mortgage and a growing family - at the time we thanked god for the massive inflation as the debt on the house shrank to insignificance!
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Talking about Imps. I had a Simca 1000 Rallye I watched it rust into a heap in no time. Real fun to drive tho.
My old escort was fun to couldnāt keep traction in the wet or snow.
Mini & Fiesta. Were ok too. My old Yamaha DT 400 MX Singl cylinder 400cc 2 stroke. A rare bike not many made wish I still had that.
When I first started work in 79 a guy had an old corsair, it was a complete heap outside and in, it had big patches of rust on the panels but no actual holes. These days it would be a quite cool rat look.
My Father had a 1969 Lancia Flavia which he passed on to me. By the mid 1970ās I could swear that it was dissolving in the rain as the rust was so bad in the sills and door bottoms and there was a brown stain on my drive.