This is along the lines of “take away helmets to make football safer”.

It may be true, and it’d be very hard for them not to recommend the safest vehicles, but yeah, it becomes a vicious cycle. If so many people are already buying big, heavy SUVs and trucks that they really don’t need, then parents of new drivers feel like their kids need the same just to “compete” when there’s an…

My older brother treed the family’s Chevy Vega the first time he drove after getting his license. One of my brothers-in-law rolled his Camry when he was newly licensed. Novice drivers can get themselves into trouble in just about anything.

Yeah, the early 80's were still great for 60's cars. I might have wrecked a few myself.

While I agree with your sentiment, a teen can just easily get killed in anything at highway speeds. It starts with them making a poor decision in the first place(texting, drunk driving, speeding). The high horsepower car just makes more efficient work of it.

In fact, the IIHS recommends parents to get a bigger and heavier car over a newer and smaller car for the same price. It conducted some crash tests using a smaller car and a larger car. The crash test dummy in the smaller car was more likely to sustain injuries and suffer from trauma to the head.

Completely agree. If you actually like your car you will take better care of it. I was bought a new 2008 Malibu the summer after I turned 16. I know kids shouldn’t be bought a new car, but they wanted it to have OnStar and it was right when stability control was mandated. I was allowed to get the upgraded V6 with the…

Pfft, 21?  Anything over a certain power-to-weight ratio should require a special license at any age.

A high school friend of mine was killed shortly after graduation when he wrapped his ‘67 GTO around a tree. Back in the early 80s those were considered cool cars but weren’t particularly expensive. Two of my uncles also wrapped a car around a tree but that was my grandfather’s ex-cop car Plymouth (with a 440) so they…

First, bigger and heavier cars are far safer for their occupants. Second, electronic stability control is also handy for an inexperienced driver.

That’s terrible. I had a classmate when I was in high-school (late aughts) who had just been gifted a brand-new 2007 Lexus IS 350, in anticipation of his sixteenth birthday. He managed to convince his parents—who were from Japan and not terribly aware of US laws—that he could drive to school and back on just his…

This issue is easily solved by making the kid buy their own insurance, like my parents did. Anything I actually wanted to drive was prohibitively expensive and therefore out of reach for me working 20 hours a week in HS.

I drove a hand-me-down 1998 Subaru Outback for the first 8 years of my driving life. A car with 280,000 miles. That poor thing did everything I asked of it - even autocross. When I turned 24, I finally got myself a brand new BRZ. You’d think, as a car nut, that I would say, “Boy! I wish I could have had the BRZ from…

My first car was a V8 Mustang. Of course, at that time, that meant that I could break the bias-ply tire loose and screech the tire really loud if I really got on it.

I would agree with limiting horsepower to anyone under 21. We had a kid in town that received an RS4 for HS graduation. He died about 2 months later at an estimated 90+ over a blind hill.

You are aware of how financing works, yes? If you find yourself in possession of something that needs $100,000 worth of repairs to be able to sell for $10,000,000, you can find any number of banks willing to give you a $100,000 loan secured by the auction proceeds.

Basically - he struck gold.  My guess is he got financing for the restoration, and we’ll soon see it go for several million on the auction block.

Holy crap, 60 000 crowns was a lot of money even back then, he could’ve bought a new Skoda sedan for that kind of money.

I have built Revell models that were more complicated than an actual Beetle.

The funny thing is that Mazda’s current interiors are among the worst offenders. That concept is nice though.