Conditional

The supposition we can make about such past events that we know they actually happned is only counterfactual.

As to the past event of "the car often broke down", one of the counterfactual suppositions we can make about it would be "the car never broke down". So it would be possibe to make a sentence like;

If the car had never broken down, I could have driven her to the station every morning.

paco