In my 'youth' I had several American cars, which were plentiful here due to USAF bases around my area. 'Proper 'Murican' 70's stuff, nice and sharp square things that all did 18mpg (except a Cherokee Jeep I had with a 6.6 AMC and a 4-bbl Rochester, which did 11mpg, and a '76 Cadillac Seville with new fangled EFI that could actually get over 20mpg!! Woohoo!). You don't get many of those sorts of cars any more, and what's left goes for huge money. Funny, all I would have needed to do is put all the cars I've had into storage and I'd be sitting on a fortune now!
Funnily enough, I recall fuel worked out at 10p/mile (£1.80 a gallon). Now it is £6.00 a gal, I get 60 mpg out of my diesel cars, still 10p/mile (only 2p/mile for EV miles, of course!).
In general, back then if it had acquired a registration plate (by one means or another - don't ask me how the US bases got them registered) then they would pass MoT (annual vehicle test) as long as they were unmodified. I did have a few tricky MoT's where some of the testers didn't know the fine points of the law with the red turn indicators and it was too much hassle to argue so I'd just take it to another MoT station 'til I found one that passed it!
One tricky occasion I recall was that the 'e-brake' on my Plymouth was literally just an unsheathed wire running along the underside of the body. As one tester pointed out, quite correctly really, using that every day would cause the wire to wear out against the underside in short order. He seemed to accept the argument that the car is not designed to have that brake used every time and was only for emergencies, but in reality the UK law does say that a car should have a mechanical brake applied when stationary and the parking pawl is not, technically, sufficient to satisfy the construction and use regs, AFAIK.
