Do you remember your first car? Most of us probably do. All the highs and lows of your first taste of freedom, the four wheels that carried you out into the world. But many people’s first cars were, in a word, bad. Yesterday, we asked you for the worst first car you could imagine, and you had a lot of opinions on the matter. Here’s what you said.
Ford Model T.
Very hard to drive. Hard to find parts for. Inherently unsafe. Slow.
Consider, however, how cool a sixteen-year-old would look rolling up to high school in one. Sure, they’d never get there on time, but it would be an event when they arrived.
Those are easy cars to out-idiot—a ‘69 Charger makes your choices look absolutely sane:
1) The kid would instantly be the most popular kid in school. 2) And by sometime that night, he’ll be dead from making like Dominic Toretto—along with whatever jackass friends were in the deathmobile. Totally serious here.
The modern lumpmobile Charger at least has a proper safety cage and all sorts of safety equipment—all you have in the 2nd gen are seat belts with nylon stitching so brittle, they’ll probably instantly give and send the kid crashing thru the windshield.
And it’s not the horsepower that would kill the kid, it’s the lack of brakes. Like I’ve written before, you DO NOT want to be in the position of praying you have to get a car with manual drum brakes to halt. And with someone not used to such a barebones car with no nanny gadgets, he’s dead—pretty tough to be worse—at least the modern Charger is survivable.
Of course, the 1969 Dodge Charger Guy is talking specifically about a Charger here, but this can be applied to most classic American muscle cars. Their power-to-chassis-and-brakes ratio is absurd, especially for someone still learning what all the different road signs mean.
Anything “super duty” molded into the plastic trim. Any HD vehicle. Not just “hot versions” of trucks, just your regular would-be cattle tower. Dang, they are even often pre-lifted nowadays.
These are “cheap” in a lot of places, has enough power to be a jerk, still have enough torque to break away from a newbie, a braking distance of a freight train, and also provides them that “entitled superior feeling” ... and they always want to race any other vehicle that is either lifted or is a coupe. Why?
Big trucks also have terrible visibility, so the Monster Energy-fueled teen at the wheel won’t even know whether they just ran over a branch or a grandmother.
Anything full size is the worse choice as a first car, especially for a teen driver who has anxiety about speeding and parking in small space.
Witchy Whale’s example photo was a late-nineties F-150, which reminded me of the guy I knew in high school whose first vehicle was an early-aughts F-150. HE used to park it dead center of four spots at Buffalo Wild Wings. I cannot find a better way to sum up his Whole Deal.
This was my second car, but in retrospect it was a terrible idea and as a first car it would have been even worse - I had a 1990 Mustang GT. Foxbody Mustangs were cheap and easy ways for high schoolers to go fast. I was a good kid and I still found myself way too tempted to speed and do stupid things. Which I did. Plus, Foxbody Mustangs have very little tail weight, so speeding around curves led to some really bad situations where I probably should have wrecked.
So, this vote is for the Foxbody specifically. It was the most tail-happy Mustang and probably one of the cheapest ways to go fast in the 80's and 90's.
Many people will tell you that, in an American version of Initial D, Takumi would drive a Fox Body. They’re absolutely wrong — he would drive an Omni GLH, but Iketani would have a Fox Body. As first cars go, they’re certainly fun, but an easy way to get yourself hurt out on the roads.
Anything old.
Teen drivers are not great drivers. They’re more than likely going to wreck, and when they do, you want them having modern safety features like crumple zones, active seat belts, airbags, etc around them.
You also want to give them the tools to avoid an accident if possible, ABS brakes, blind spot monitoring, etc.
Idiot teens are, as the name implies, idiots. They’re more likely to crash, so they’re more likely to need all the crash protection you get in modern cars. You can make the argument that active crash prevention features, like blind spot monitoring and automatic emergency braking, teach bad habits — but you can also make the argument that they mean more alive kids.
Worst first car? The one you get to go to a dealership and pick out. Those kids were the worst. Having to drive a hand-me down or a hooptie that you can afford builds character and teaches you the value of the independence that a car can give you. It also gives you more of a stake in what you have.
This is less a reflection on the car itself, and more a reflection on the people who can afford brand-new cars in high school. The cars themselves aren’t the issue here.
Looking back, I think the worst would be anything you’d have to finance but is still old enough/crappy enough to require repairs. I learned this the hard way.
Are all cars... a little bad?
Anything with 600 hp. New drivers here have to show a ‘N’ badge, and whenever I see one on a modern high-performance car I always think ‘that parent must not like this kid’.
‘Round these parts, an N badge means a performance Hyundai. We don’t have none of them “probationary licenses,” because that’s an assault on our god-given freedoms.
Oh, Oh, I win, I win. I was in high school in the mid 80s. There were some really stupid cars in the lot. One was a GTO with a lumpy cam, and a 6" lift to the back to shove on some big rear tires. It would have been fast as hell if it wasn’t made out of Bondo.
But the winner was in the Rich kids part of the lot. There were a couple parents that had a dick measuring contest on who got their kid the coolest new car.
The “winner” for about a week (before it nearly killed the driver and passenger) was a car that looked just like this. Not just a 930 Whale-tail. A RUF 930 whale-tail. A widow maker with extra sauce.
The kid that got it had failed their driver’s test 6 times before they passed.
Look, all I’m saying is, a car can’t legally be a widowmaker if it targets people too young to have wives. Modern problems require modern solutions.
Ram TRX? RWD, 700+hp, expensive, enough room to stupidly kill yourself and 4 of your friends (plus more in the bed if you’re extra dumb), tires that can’t keep up with the weight and power on the street if you’re doing dumb things, light rear end, will steam roll people/cars/houses if you hit something insuring maximum destruction.
Even if you aren’t tempted to do dumb things, it’s so big that it’s easy for an unexperienced driver to not see things or know how to properly maneuver it/know where the car actually ends.
The RAM TRX is an absurd vehicle for any age group, but kids who don’t yet know the rules of the road would likely have the worst results trying to handle one.
I have a feeling that anything high-powered and electric would be substantially more dangerous than the Swinger twins.
Near instantaneous throttle response + north of 600 horsepower + teenager hormones are a recipe for smacking sideways into something at 70mph because you don’t yet have an understanding for taking turns, or understand just how stupid your dumb fucking plans are.
The first teen to try and drift their EV in the rain will have an amazing five seconds of sliding, followed by a terrible six weeks in the hospital.
Any car that is well above the average of what everyone else can afford at your school. I remember a student at my high school rolled in one day in a new Porsche Boxter. It lasted all of one week until jealous teenagers decorated it with spray paint, keyed obscenities, and slashed tires.
I guess he got the hint, because the following week he quietly slipped into the parking lot with a Honda Accord.
The last thing you wan to do, in a world of hormone-addled teens, is to stick out as The Rich Kid. The Accord is a good idea.
Full size pickups and Jeep Wranglers - which ironically are first vehicles of choice for a large proportion of kids in the US and Canada.
Trucks because they have iffy handling, too much power, lots of blind spots, and poor safety records. Wranglers because they are unstable, handle poorly, and also have terrible safety ratings.
Ideal first vehicle is a small hatchback or sedan with less than 50hp plus airbags - but I don’t think there’s anything like that available in the US today.
In my hometown, you saw far more four-door wranglers than two-doors. Likely because they’re more prevalent on dealer lots, but they have the advantage of being more stable in the corners too.
There are a ton of awful choices for first car, but they might well be eclipsed by bad first motorcycles. Pretty much anything with supercar performance available used under $5k is just generally a bad idea, although at least there’ll likely be far less collateral damage in the event of an accident.
I’ve been trying to convince Andy to buy a Hayabusa as a first bile for months now. I think he’s cracking.