Hot Wheels for Your Teenaged Driver?

Eric Peters

Should a minor teen driver have a new car? How about a fast new car? To me the answer seems obvious. No to both. Yet apparently, at least some parents disagree with me - because a month doesn't go by without a story popping up in the local news about a bad accident involving a kid 18 or younger driving a new car he had to have been given by his parents. Or which, at least, they allowed him to have (minors are still obliged to obey their parents until the reach legal adult status).

Often, it is a fast new car - BMW 3-Series, import sport compact. Mustang. Sometimes, it's an exotic ultra-performance car - as in the case of a Florida kid (age 18) who, along with three of his friends, got killed when the 500 horsepower, $75,000 BMW M5 uber sport sedan he was driving went violently out of control at an extreme speed and basically disintegrated, along with the teenage occupants.

Reading the obit columns I shake my head and wonder - are the parents of these kids irresponsible? Or just uninformed? Maybe both. For openers, they may not realize just how high the "performance envelope" of modern cars - even ordinary modern cars - is relative to what they grew up with 20 or 30 years earlier. For example, a current year family sedan such as a Toyota Camry V-6 can reach 130-plus mph on the top end and gets from zero to 60 in under 7 seconds. That is about as quick and as fast as most V-8 muscle cars of the 1960s.

But the difference is the Camry doesn't feel like it's doing much at 90 mph. A '69 SS 396 Chevelle did. The sheer racket, the straining sounds of gears and tires, the vibration and exhaust noise - served as audibles that you were getting in deep and maybe ought to chill out. But the kid in the Camry feels fine at 90 - one hand on the wheel, the other texting with a friend on his iPhone.

It's a similar story with handling and braking. New cars - even ordinary ones - have very high thresholds relative to the cars of the past. It's easy to feel like Jeff Gordon - and invincible - taking curvy freeway off ramps at 20 over the posted maximum. But when the threshold of the car's grip is reached, things (often, bad things) happen very quickly. Not only is there less time to react, because the speeds are so much higher, the end result of getting in over you head is likely to be that much worse.

When a high-performance car is involved, the teen's odds of making it to 21 just went down another several notches. But - key point - it's not the cars themselves that are the main problem. It's mixing such cars with the two things that define the teenage years - inexperience and immaturity. That's the lethal cocktail.

Even those with high natural ability to become exceptional drivers need time to develop that potential. Very few teens have had much in the way of formal training beyond the most basic "driver's ed" stuff - which rarely, if ever, involves skid pads and high-speed emergency/accident avoidance maneuvering. One does not begin to appreciate the physics of vehicle control - and of both the car's and one's own limits as a driver - until one has actually experienced both.

These skills can be learned on the track - or on the street. But in both case, they take time and don't just happen. Jeff Gordons are both born - and made. Jeff was not ready for Daytona at 16. Neither is your teenage son or daughter - no matter how high their opinion of their own skills may be. If the heads side of the coin is inexperience, the tail side is immaturity.

Certainly, there are teens who are responsible beyond their years. But they are the exception, not the rule. This isn't an assault on the young; it's a reality check. Teenage drivers are - and always have been - the most accident prone group of drivers, accounting for the lion's share of accidents and fatalities involving motor vehicles.

They tend to take more risks; they are prone to peer pressure (and showing off for friends) and their judgment is not as well-formed as it will be when they are 30.

Recent medical evidence provides some interesting data on this; apparently, the areas of the teenaged brain that control inhibitions and so on are not yet fully formed - revealing a physiological reason why teens tend to get into more trouble than adults. When you're 16 or 17, death is an abstraction. It is something that happens to old people; not to you.

Finally, there is the issue of what might be called "life lessons." Will a kid who is given an expensive brand new car value it as much as the kid who had to work his tail off for years to scrounge up enough lawn-mowing and McDonalds money to buy his own car - even if it's an older, not so impressive model? Probably not.

Result? The teenager who was given a car will be more likely to take chances with it; after all, Mom & Dad will buy just buy another one.

The latter point is a value judgment - and it's possible to have an intelligent discussion about it, pro and con. But there's little that can be said in defense of giving an inexperience or immature (probably both but at least one of the two) teenager a powerful car of any description. Unless you're not all that concerned about your kid making it to 21.