Actually, it was a VW Beetle. It makes it into the list not so much because of what it was but because of what it taught me -- both good and bad. Within its limitations it was a pretty good car, and far from unusual. In fact, the roads were crawling with them.
Friend Malcolm was leaving Holland and would have thrown this car away, except that he had recently put a complete new set of tires on it. "Hey", he said. "Those tires and wheels would fit your van nicely when you wear out the ones that are on it." He was right, so I put aside the suspicion that the Michelins that were on the van had another decade or two of life left and bought some cheap tires with a VW Beetle attached to them to give me somewhere to keep them. I found that I rather liked it. This was the sports model (sunroof) and the 1300cc engine pushed it along nicely. Given that I was used to The Can, it seemed to go round corners without too much fuss. And, provided you were careful to keep the piece of wood as an insulator on top of the battery, it didn't catch fire when somebody was in the back seat (not an unusual problem with beetles).
So what could go wrong? Well, what could go wrong was that it gave me the idea that it was okay for one person to own more than one car without having one of them for sale. This, I believe, was responsible for my second descent into the depths of Triumph ownership.
The cockroach acquired an unusual (but rather pleasant) odor as a result of an emergency stop combined with a bottle of Beaujolais on the back seat, which made it difficult to find a home for it when I moved on. But I gave it to a friend, who drove it until her husband decided it was just too much of a Cockroach, and she passed it on to another friend who drove it for another year or so until encountering an unusually observant Rijkspolitie officer, who noticed that most of the bodywork "repairs" were merely cosmetic (aluminum sheeting pop-riveted onto ferrous oxide).
And that was the end of The Cockroach. A good-hearted little car that taught me a Bad Thing.