The only positive attribute was a splendid hooter

 From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 149.

Meanwhile I still had two years to go at Oxford. For my last, 1951–1952, I moved out of New College and into digs just round the corner in Holywell Street, run by a certain Mrs. Hall. My fellow lodgers were to remain friends for life: Johnny Lawrence (later Oaksey), Miles Jebb (later Gladwyn) and—alas no longer with us—Raymond Bonham Carter, father of the lovely Helena.

We were fond of Mrs. Hall, though we teased her mercilessly, but were a good deal less enamored of her French bulldog, one of the ugliest and smelliest beasts I have ever encountered. By now I was—after a fashion—mobile, having bought for £75 my first car, a 1922 Bean. Hardly anybody now remembers Beans; it was, I suspect, not only because of their ridiculous name that they went out of production at an early stage of motoring history. Mine, though it boasted a rudimentary self-starter, almost always had to be cranked by hand—not a pleasant job in pouring rain. But rain, together with cold, revealed other, more serious defects. The car had a retractable hood but no windows, a windscreen but no wipers. The screen was composed  of two separate panes of glass of which the upper could be raised outwards on a hinge, creating a narrow gap through which the driver could peer while the rain beat mercilessly on to his face. The only positive attribute was a splendid hooter, activated by a sharp squeeze on a rubber bulb, which gave us all intense satisfaction. With this perfectly dreadful machine my poor Anne would show superhuman patience, frequently arriving at parties windswept and blue with cold.