Chevette was my first new car, purchased all by myself, in about 1977. IIRC, it was under $3,000. It was manual transmission, and no AC. Not my favorite car ever, but surely a memorable one.
It was my first new car, too! I bought it in the early ‘eighties, and it lasted me ten years.
Finally developed a bad problem that made it entirely unreliable, and the mechanic I was seeing just told me it was unfixable. An immigrant family in the neighborhood asked me to give it to them instead of junking it; I was hesitant, but I knew that the father was very good at fixing cars. He found the problem - the gas was mixing with oil, or something; and it could have exploded. He fixed it, and his wife drove it for several years more.
It was a great little ‘entry’ car for a young person, back then.