Conventional wisdom says we give our youngest drivers our oldest cars. But shouldn’t the least experienced driver get the safest—which is to say, newest—car in your household? Ezra Dyer and K.C. Colwell argue it out.
Your first car isn’t supposed to be nice. A first car should be purchased with meager proceeds from mowing lawns, babysitting and perhaps some occasional lifeguarding. You’ve gotta pay your dues, according to the long-established conventions of American child-rearing. Mom gets the new car. You, the 16-year-old, get the 20-year-old Corolla, and you’re happy to have it. This is the universally accepted shape of the teenager-parent automotive hierarchy.
For Teen Drivers
But what if we’re approaching this all wrong? Cars get safer every year—better structures, cocoons of airbags, ever more capable electronic driver aids. And who’s the most likely beneficiary of all that progress? Probably the least experienced driver in the household. Maybe we’ve got this backward, and the greenest drivers should get the safest—which is to say, probably the newest—car in the household. It’s a debate worth having, so let’s have it.
Give The Kid The New Car
Ezra Dyer, Senior Editor
The other day I was driving a Nissan Kicks and found myself thinking, “This would be a great car for my 17-year-old niece.” As in: not fast, has a good sound system and a ton of safety gear—blind-spot warning, rear automatic braking, lane-departure warning, automated emergency braking with pedestrian detection. And then I thought, “Who does she think she is with this new car? Nobody I knew in high school had a new car. I didn’t buy a new car until I was 30. She doesn’t deserve this car.” And that’s true. It’s also the wrong way to think about this question.
I’ve been to the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety and watched a crash test. I’ve seen their gallery of structural fails. The data doesn’t lie: cars generally get safer from year to year. Structures improve, with new metallurgy and more sophisticated load paths. Electronics evolve, with ever cheaper cameras and radar turning unblinking eyes to the road ahead (and behind). There are even those narc-y apps, like GM’s Teen Driver, that let you set limits on stereo volume and top speed. You’re not going to get that in the ’07 Malibu Maxx that young Parker bought with the lawn-mowing money.
Now, between a parent and a kid, who do you think is a more dangerous driver? That’s easy. It’s the one with the underutilized frontal lobe and a few hours of driver training administered by a half-checked-out high-school teacher moonlighting in the right seat of a white Ford Taurus with a yellow triangle on the roof. Yes, you should go ahead and sign your kid up for supplementary driving instruction to teach them the things they won’t learn in driver ed (which is to say, most things). But that’s still not going to level the behind-the-wheel abilities in your household.
Your kid might be able to drift like Oliver Solberg, but that doesn’t mean she’ll start slowing down when she sees brake lights three cars ahead in traffic. Or that, when she sees a deer on the left side of the road, she’ll anticipate two more coming from the right. Or that she’ll straddle the ruts during a downpour to avoid hydroplaning. These are all the kind of reflexive moves that we olds make without realizing we’re making them, because we’ve covered hundreds of thousands of miles since we got our licenses. There’s a certain ingrained situational awareness that takes years to accrue.
And I don’t think kids are going to miss out on building that knowledge just because the car saves their asses once in a while, whether via a blind-spot warning or automatic braking or a stability-control intervention. And should the worst happen—which, remember, can also be someone else’s fault entirely—I’d rather have my kid in the car with recent IIHS accolades than the one that happened to be affordable.
My older son is nine, and he recently asked if I thought he’d be driving my Bronco to high school. Hell no, I said. No ABS, no stability control, no airbags, camber-changing front suspension—you gotta level up a few times before you get to the Bronco. As much as it pains me to say it, I imagine that when the time comes, I’m going to suck it up and get him something like the Nissan Kicks. Something new-adjacent, at least. And then, maybe after he’s covered 10 or 20 thousand miles, I’ll let him take a crack at the Bronco. You don’t earn the new car. You earn the old one.
A Kid’s First Car Should Be a Truck. An Old One.
K.C. Colwell, Deputy Director of Testing
Your kids are going to do unthinkable things to whatever car they drive, so let’s take a deep breath and try to logically tackle this dilemma instead of just throwing technology at the problem. The best thing you can do is teach your kids to be good, confident drivers while minimizing distraction. I am a big proponent of forcing new drivers to learn to drive using a manual transmission. I did it when pagers were more popular than cellphones, and a manual will keep the phone out of their hands.
Kids should also build situational awareness without depending on electronic helpers like blind-spot monitors. Sure, any car purchased in the future will have a battery of electronic assistants, but keeping the bells and whistles to a minimum and making them engage with the car will only improve confidence. Stability control, however, is a must. The data is conclusive: It dramatically reduces the number of single-car accidents.
So, what type of car should you be looking at? You don’t want to give your kids the keys to a party bus or something with too much power that could land them in trouble. And you’ve got to consider the social context of a first car—that old minivan sitting idle in the driveway may have a lame outer skin, but your child will become the de facto carpool. A smaller car with fewer seats equals fewer distractions and less peer pressure to do dumb stuff. There are plenty of things fighting for the teenager’s attention as it is. Don’t add to the mix.
If you want minimal passenger capacity and low frills, nothing says confidence like a small, regular-cab pickup. Amirite? They have the elevated vantage point and safety placebo of an SUV, the seating capacity (+1) of a Porsche Boxster, and, if they’re new enough, ABS and stability control. Finding one with a manual transmission may be difficult, but they are out there. One of the best parts is that no one will cry when it inevitably gets damaged, and once your new driver has proven themselves and graduated to “cooler” wheels, you end up with a beater pickup, which is a wonderfully useful thing to own. I am sure there are studies out there that tell me I’m wrong. But something like an old GMC Canyon feels awfully right.
