Nous étions -- We were.

Nous conduisons. -- We drive / we are driving. 

Nous conduisions. -- We were driving / we used to drive. 

Nous avions conduit -- We had driven / we had been driving. 

Nous avons conduit. -- We drove. 

Grammatically, you never use the infinitive (conduire) after an auxiliary verb (être) in a compound tense. 

Also, the English continuous form (-ing form) does not have a one-to-one correspondence in French. 

-- Chris. 

Merci, Cécile. Why not nous étions conduire?  This is a new level for me. I’ve re-read the related lessons but I’m still missing it. I feel like it’s staring me in the face but I’m not seeing it. Thanks in advance for helping me see my error. 

Nous étions conduire doesn't mean anything. It is a literal translation from English which simply has nomparallel in French. 

-- Chris. 

Nous étions conduire doesn't mean anything. It is a literal translation from English which simply has nomparallel in French. 

-- Chris. 

Mais no! :-) 

if it means nothing, then why does it show up in Conjugate être in L'Imparfait (imperfect tense)

Merci

By “it” I mean nous étions.  Why, grammatically, is it incorrect to use it in “ we were driving”? Isn’t one use of l’imparfait yo express continuing action in the past?

Thank you SO much.  That’s what I needed!

And also I just realized I was mistaken in using être as the auxiliary.  I was thinking of driving as a coming/going verb. Thank you again.