Quote Originally Posted by kburr View Post
Also, how would you say "I drove a car"
Drove a car WHERE? Remember that with unprefixed verbs of motion, there's a distinction between round trips and one-way travel, and you have to keep that in mind when translating from English. For example:

Last year, I drove a car to Moscow (but I live in St. Petersburg).
Here, there's an implied round trip, so you'd use the unprefixed "indeterminate/multidirectional" verb, ездить:
В прошлом году, я ездил в Москву на машине.

Yesterday, I drove a car here to Moscow.
Here, it's a one-way trip that's been completed (i.e. it's perfective), since the conversation is taking place in Moscow. Use a prefixed form of the unidirectional ехать:
Вчера я приехал сюда в Москву на машине.

When I was driving a car here, I nearly got into an accident.
And here, something happens DURING the (one-way) trip -- use an unprefixed (and thus imperfective) form of unidirectional ехать:
Кодга я ехал сюда на машине, я чуть не попал в аварию.

Summary:

progressive-past "was driving" = ехать without a prefix
simple past "drove", when a round-trip is implied = ездить without a prefix
simple past "drove", when a one-way trip is implied = ехать WITH some sort of prefix (по-, подъ-, при-) depending on context.

This is generalizable for other past-tense Verbs of Motion (ходить/идти, носить/нести). Things work slightly differently in the present tense, but you can deal with that later!

P.S. In all the above sentences, you could use the instrumental машиной ("by car") instead of the prepositional на машине ("in a car"). Or you could leave out the word "car"/машина, and just use the appropriate form of the "vehicular" pair ездить/ехать, without needing to specify the vehicle (just as in English, "I drove" or "I was driving" is sufficient, without saying whether it was a car or a truck or a motorcycle or whatever).