The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a story in the New York Times on July 16, 2014 titled “Teenagers’ Cars Are Older, Smaller, and Less Safe”, where the IIHS had performed a study that basically said that older vehicles and vehicles that weighed 2,000 to 2,500 lbs. were inherently unsafe and that in order to protect your teenager, that you should:
“Avoid vehicles with a lot of horsepower, since those can tempt teenagers to drive too fast; look for larger, heavier vehicles which provide better protection in a crash; get a vehicle with electronic stability control, which helps a driver to maintain control of a vehicle on curves and slippery roads; and choose a vehicle with the highest possible safety rating.”
Be careful, kids. It will kill you.
Am I the only one who thinks that the above suggestions are little more than a thinly veiled attempt at moving cars? Let’s look at this carefully. First off, the vehicles referenced by this story are Mini Coopers, Toyota Corollas and Ford Focus, the kinds of cars that you’d normally expect to make great first cars. Each car respectively weigh in (approximately) at 2,600, 2,800, and 2,960 lbs. I had to go to a seven-year-old Kia Rio to find a curb weight under 2,500 lbs, and a 1984 Dodge Colt for a weight at or under 2,000 lbs.
You said you wanted large, heavy and slow…
Better still, let’s look at the safety ratings: The Cooper has good ratings from the IIHS, the Corolla has mostly good ratings (though it did get a Marginal for small overlap front impact), and the Focus has good ratings. So who is right? IIHS or…IIHS? I don’t understand, the good ratings aren’t good? I’m lost.
Avoiding high-horsepower vehicles for a teen’s first car is a great idea. But what constitutes high-horsepower? I’d wager that a teenager with a 275hp ’93 Camaro Z28 can have plenty fun. No? What about grandma’s ’99 Grand Prix with the 240hp blower motor? Face it, folks: You could give your kid a 1993 Ford Aspire and the only successful thing you’d have done is kept him from getting laid. If it has a motor, a teenager will find a way to have fun with the car, regardless of what it is..
Thanks, Grandma!
Now, for a larger, heavier vehicle for Junior to drive. Any 1970s or 1980s barge would do, but nowadays most people flinch at the though of a car with no airbag in it to save a teenager’s over-entitled head from meeting the steering wheel, so that leaves me with one option: full-size SUV’s. Perfect for the kid who can barely make $7.50 an hour…a $110 bill at the gas pump every time! That’ll teach that brat to ride the bus. Great thinking.
Which one would YOU pick?
While I think every teenager should be made to do donuts on an ice rink until they understand skid control, I can at least understand having ESC on the car, so I’ll skip that point. The last one, “buy a vehicle with the highest safety rating”, grates my nerves. That implies that you, as the parent, don’t have the ability to pick out a proper car, so let the fine folks at the IIHS do it for you. Right. So prepare yourself, because you’re a thoughtless parent if you don’t put your little darlings into one of the cars on their list. It wasn’t that long ago that as long as the car was street-legal, tuned properly, and the kid wasn’t an absolute jackass behind the wheel that there was no problem.
I hate these studies. What it usually comes down to for a parent is cost and reliability. My daughter started out with a rattle trap 95 Sunfire that someone had already applied plenty of dings and scratches to. The thing was a tank for a little car (you should have seen the damage it did to a dodge minivan and I couldn’t even find damage on the Sunfire). Did it have an airbag, yes, but it didn’t go off during the minivan wreck. Did it have ESC, probably not. Did it survive her, yep. Did she probably drive it harder than it deserved, probably.
I think the bigger question here is who’s responsibility is it to raise my kids, choose their cars and teach them to drive. Pretty sure that falls on me, just like it fell on my parents. Do kids do stupid things and bad things happen in cars (motorcycles, quads, horses, skateboards, bikes…)? yep. Does it matter hat kind of car it is?, nope.
We’re all probably lucky we survived our teenage years.
One of my uncles had the opposite line of thinking; after his oldest son wrecked three cars, my uncle restricted him to nothing but motorcycles. My cousin had no choice then but to really pay attention. It worked; he hasn’t had a wreck since.
Not sure I could bring myself to take that approach when my kids turn 16!
When I watched this story on the news all I got out of it was that you are supposed to buy your kid an expensive, late model car to drive. Literally above $10,000, or you are a bad parent and your kid will die horribly.
I started off in a 500 ci powered Coupe de Ville. I know that car was safe because it survived a 150 ft air borne flight at the hands of my sister and we both lived, the car drove away. (OK, we were more than lucky). When Dad found out how damaged the car was he replaced it with a ’77 Honda Accord hatchback with the 2 spd Hondamatic. I went from 375 hp and 550 tq to 83 hp and 10 tq.
Did that stop me? No. I beat on that Honda mercilessly. I discovered how much fun a hand brake can be in a front drive car. I flat spotted the back tires more times than I can count. Thankfully, they were cheap then.
To me it’s just another way of saying that the rich will live and poor will die because of the cars they can or cannot afford.
“the only successful thing you’d have done is kept him from getting laid.”
Unless you want your spawn featured on MTV’s “16 and Pregnant,” that’s not such a bad objective for responsible parenting.
IIHS is just a conglomeration of insurance companies who don’t want to pay claims. The actuaries say big, heavy airbag-filled barges result in lower personal injury payouts. And the insurance industry has hated horsepower since at least the 1960s. Nothing new here.
I did a lot more crazy stuff in low-powered cars and pickups when I was a dumb kid than I ever did in the dirt-cheap used ’60s muscle that was at my disposal. For example, the first car I ever flew like the “Dukes of Hazard” was a 4,500-lb mastodon that at best wheezed out and IIHS-pleasing 125 h.p.
I’d much rather a kid learn car control in a Mustang with proper tires, handing suspension, and an Autopower cage than to roll an ill-handling, lo-po minivan, pickup, or SUV trying to impress his idiot texting friends.
The key isn’t saddling them with heavy junk, or scaring the crap out of them, or surrounding them with 25 airbags, IMHO. . . It’s proper, serious driver training on an appropriate closed course. And kids need to learn where and when to drive hard . . . and have appropriate opportunities for it . . . and serious consequences for failing to restrain themselves to legal outlets for performance driving.
EXCELLENT POINTS.
The best suggestion I have seen yet for any kids first car is to get them a 5 speed, then they don’t have any hands free for texting or anything else but driving.
Big Heavy & Slow works for me pretty good
I would have killed to have the Excursion as a HS kid (or now, too expensive for me). But hey I’m weird