I had a conversation with someone I know whose teenaged son recently totaled the late-model BMW 3 Series sedan he was driving. You can perhaps already tell where this story is going. The kid is ok – and so is the driver of the other car – but he is now uninsurable and will be for at least the next five years.
Teenagers and late-model luxury sport-sedans go together like gasoline and matches. If you don’t know what you’re doing – if you’re not careful – either combination can very quickly end up a disaster. I asked the someone I know why her teenaged kid was driving a late-model BMW 3 Series sedan since very few (if any) teenaged kids have the money to buy a car like that or the money to pay for things like tires and brakes. Let alone the insurance – even before totaling it. She told me she’d been paying for the whole shebang – because that’s what he wanted. Well, naturally. I remember being a teenaged kid and I wanted lots of things, too – including a muscle car (they were the thing for teenaged boys back in the ’80s). Thankfully, all I could afford on my summer lawn mowing/winter snow-shoveling and after-school McDonald’s job was a rusty old beater that was as muscular as Pee Wee Herman. I say thankfully because the odds are that, had I been given an muscular car, I’d probably have wrecked it, too.
Too much, too soon tends to have that result.
She also paid the kid’s insurance, which is why he was able to drive a late-model BMW 3 Series sedan. Back when I was the kid’s age, we were able to “get away” with not paying for insurance at all – by checking the little box that said we had. In those bygone times, the insurance mafia wasn’t connected to the government mafia and so as long as you didn’t wreck, you could “get away” without actually having insurance. That’s how teenaged kids were able to afford to drive, back then. Today, it’s not feasible to “get away” with it, because the insurance mafia and the government mafia are now the same mafia; the moment your “coverage” lapses (or if you haven’t actually bought “coverage”) the government will know and then you’ll pay even more.
The only way a teenaged kid can afford insurance today is by not driving anything remotely like a late-model BMW 3 Series sedan (let alone a muscle car). The cost to “cover” a high-miles, low-powered beater (a well-worn Nissan Versa, for instance) is going to be higher anyhow, because teenaged drivers are higher risk. The odds of having an “accident” sometime in between 16 and 25 are much higher than they are in between 35 and 45. The mafia isn’t wrong – or entirely unjustified – in charging teenaged drivers more for “coverage.”
By not buying a teenaged kid a BMW (or anything remotely muscular) as a first car, a parent is doing their kid a huge favor because he or she will likely have to make do with a beater they won’t wreck (or wreck as badly) and thus they’ll be able to get sort-of-affordable insurance in their 20s.
My friend meant well; she wanted her kid to have the kind of car he wanted. She wanted him to have a “safe” car with all the “technology.” Now it’s in a junkyard, along with the other car he totaled – and now he won’t be able to afford insurance for years to come. He also could have been killed – or ended up killing someone else. I offered her some free advice which might actually be worth something.
Well, it might be worth something to someone else who has a teenaged kid who hasn’t yet wrecked a car that was too to much, too soon for them at this early stage in their lives.
First, let them know they’ll be buying their own first car years before they’re old enough to drive. Give them in skin in the game. Maybe help them. But don’t buy them a late-model car outright.
People tend to take better care of the things that they had to work for, as opposed to things they’re given. This will also assure they’ll be driving something like a high-miles old beater – which is an excellent “safety” feature for a teenaged driver. It may not have six air bags but he or she’s not as likely to need them because it’s less likely they’ll get in way over their heads in a slow, crickety car than in a fast, high-performance car that feels deceptively easy to drive fast and for that reason will be driven faster than the inexperienced driver is able to safely drive fast.
Two, insist on a manual transmission as the condition of being allowed to own a car at all while they’re under your roof. A manual transmission is another excellent “safety” feature in that it is harder to text while driving in a stick-shift car than it is in an automatic car. Also, driving stick fosters heightened situational awareness – another important “safety” feature.
Three, explain that what they want and what they get are two different things. It’s this understanding that’s the first step on the road to growing up.
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Equally irresponsible to give a teenager a crotch rocket which is a trend I’ve been noticing. There’s a reason for the expression “young, dumb, and full of cum”.
‘Give them skin in the game.’ — eric
My ex-wife had an Isuzu Trooper which had been rock-solid reliable for a dozen years. When she no longer needed it, instead of selling it for the $3,000 or so it was worth, she impulsively gave it to a neighborhood teenager.
Within a couple of months, the automatic transmission failed and wasn’t worth replacing. Mere coincidence? Possibly. But I suspect if the kid actually had paid for the car with his own funds, the result would have been different.