My good buddy The Bishop keeps dropping fresh Autopian Asks on me, and by golly I’m gonna keep taking them. His most recent query was “What Was The Best Era To Be A New Driver?”, and while it’s easy for one to see the decade you got your license in as Peak Car, you lot are much more insightful than that. And less romantic, too, at least if you’re 4jim, who shot nostalgia full of holes, so to speak:
4jim
These comments will be on fire with survivorship bias. I will not romanticize times in the past without airbags, antilock brakes and seatbelts. I will not wistfully look back at times when cars broke down constantly. I am sure there was a sweet spot for young people when the cars were reasonably save, gas and insurance were not wild but the socio-economic landscape varies wildly so I will not guess when that was.
Look Jim, we’re gonna put the armor where the damage is, OK? That’s just common sense!
More …
My Other Car Is A Tetanus Shot
Probably the 2000s – early 2010s.
Why? Cars were reliable and safe enough that irresponsible teens could operate/survive their inevitable poor choices, but used cars were relatively affordable and not completely rusted out or mechanically finished.
If you wanted to do the enthusiast thing, a plethora of used cars still had manual transmissions and prices for some enthusiast vehicles from previous eras hadn’t shot into the stratosphere completely. See: Jeep XJ, Nissan 240SX.
A lot of kids saw the 240SX, hoo boy. How may near-stock examples are left, I wonder?
Cars? I’ve owned a few
I got my license on my 16th birthday in 1973. I had a year before the national 55 mph speed limit kicked in. So that kind of sucked. I drove my mom’s ’65 Olds Dynamic 88 and my dad’s 53 Dodge pickup that somebody had transplanted a 318 V8 into. My first car was a ’68 Datsun 510 wagon with no radio or a/c. So, not the best of times.
A friend got a ’74 Honda Civic CVCC with a 5-speed manual. That was a really fun car for the time.
I feel like you ended with a banger there, C?IOAF.
JDE
As with all eras it really depends on your talent or dad’s talent and how many tools he has, or if he is just rich and trusts you with a hot car. Sure the 60’s sound grand, but the vietnam war meant a lot of new drivers were likely only a year or two away form being shipped out. Very few new drivers ever got the Big Block hotrods of the time too. 1970 was kind of the halcyon year for big power and fuel affordability. give it 5 years though and while even broke highschoolers could likely afford a big old hotrod, the insurance and fuel at that time would eat you alive. Still, a 73 super duty TA, or even a 77 S&B special would be fun to have had for a first car.
fast forward tot he 80’s. Reaganomics were doing some things to fix the carter era economic issues, but it was not a lot at first. however, Mustangs, Camaro’s and even quite a few imports came into their own by the last half of the decade. I would definitely take a Conquest TSI or even a TTA today. though the hot ticket was an 87-89 5 speed manual 5.0 if you wanted to have the fast car that responded to the then burgeoning aftermarket go fast market.
90’s were good in some way, terrible in others. the LTI GM got you 300 HP(i know sad) but it also brought on the jelly bean styling that limited space under hoods and then of course they tried things, things like Optispark, which they should not have tried…just saying. However, by the end the first of the LS motors started to fill in and that was perhaps the best of time for hot car for new drivers. Of course the OBD2 stuff also helped immensely for fixing and tuning. SO even though Ford had lost it with the 4.6 in the mustangs, the tuner side of things helped, and let’s not forget that Fast and Furious imports kind of had there fart piping days in the sun at that time. Which was good considering hand me down Honda’s became a big thing for many new drivers.
Honestly though, our current times outside of the increased driver restrictions and raised age of starting to drive offer much of the best cars to start on. fast and relatively safe seem to be the norm. V6 cars are 250 to 350 hp regularly mid pack sporty cars are over 400 regularly, that is numbers many from the old days would have or did pay big bucks to achieve, and today’s numbers include 20 plus MPG and good stock stereo’s with functioning AC more often than not.
Gotta say, even a 20-year-old car today can be pretty good (depending on condition, obviously)
Sid Bridge
If you were a new driver in 1900 you didn’t have to wait for a license. Heck, if you were 12 years old nobody cared as long as you knew how to operate a vehicle – where all the grease fittings were, which bands and levers you had to pull, how to magnetate the magnetos, how to set the retardificator… Let’s be honest, in 1900 only kids knew this stuff. Best time to get handed the keys to the absolutely brand spanking new horseless carriage Dad just blew all the coins he made as a shoe leather importer on.
Vanillasludge
12 year olds could drive to work in the local foundry, knock off after a quick 13 hour shift and be home for gruel by 9pm.
See? Kids had great job opportunities back then! And what better way to unwind than to pile into Dad’s curved-dash Olds with your pals and head for … I don’t know what kids did in 1903.
M. Park Hunter
The best AND worst time to be a new driver? I’ma gonna go with 1880-1910. On the pro side: EVERYBODY was a new driver, and EVERYBODY got a new car! Con: the cars were all deadly, complicated, unreliable rattletraps with non-standard controls, and there weren’t any decent roads.
Pffft, what’s a little steam gonna do? Perfectly safe.
That Belgian Guy
Had to be the seventies:
Around 1770, driving Cugnot’s drag, you would have been the hero of the town. Right untill you crashed it.
Around 1870, Bollée started series production of cars. Quite a lot of new drivers, but still empty roads and people being impressed by what was their firs sight of a real car.
Around 1970, Cars were still pretty, roads were empty, speeds higher, emission was someone elses problem …
Haha, “the 70s,” you got me Belgian Guy.
Y2Keith
For me, it was the mid-80’s, but that’s just personal experience and the fact that, at least at the time, there weren’t a lot of cops prowling my rural county, and a lot of lightly-trafficked, twisty back roads to explore. “Place” mattered every bit as much as “time” in that regard. Sure, the cars were relative crap, but at least if you messed up badly, you were a lot less likely to be destroying a future classic.
Couple that with no camera phones, dash cams, or social media, and it was a great time to learn some important lessons in the “not as hard as it would have been if all of those things existed” way. Time ran out on those conditions sometime in the aughts, I believe.
I hear you Y2K. It was a very different time when out of sight meant out of sight, out of contact, out of everything.
Burt Curry
Any time before the cash for clunkers program decimated the cheap car market. You could get a good used car for $100’s of dollars, replace the muffler or battery or alternator and drive it till the tires were bald. Plus you got to learn how to work on them yourself, because you could fix them yourself.
Cash for Clunkers, ugh. So many were lost …
Will Packer
I started driving in 1979. My friends and family group included a Baja Beetle, Subaru that we pulled the engine out by hand (no crane) Pinto, Dodge Dart, Chevy S10, Nova station wagon, and my own first car, a 1969 Ford Falcon Sport Coupe.
The sheer variety of affordable used vehicles that kids could wrench on in their own driveway was impressive. The best time to start driving!
You had me at Baja Beetle.
Spikedlemon
It’s all rose-tinted looking back.
Phuzz
That’s the Doppler effect. Things receding away from you are red-shifted as the wavelength of the incoming light is stretched. The future is blue for the same reason.
And here I thought “rose-tinted glasses” was just a saying. It’s science!
Have you hit up today’s Autopian Asks? Do it now!
What Repair Or Maintenance Task Had You Cursing The Designers Of Your Car?
I’m now sad that SuperLiberal.org is not a site. Wasn’t sure whether it would be critical or liberals with attitude.
I had to thank Phuzz for explaining the doppler shift/rose-tinted glasses thing to me. It makes perfect sense (and I don’t know why it didn’t just occur to me) and if it’s not the actual source of that saying, it damn well should be!
I tend to lean towards the late ’80s to early oughts as the peak car period, but of course I’m of a certain age, so that’s to be expected. Further, that’s a pretty big window I’ve got there… one and a half decades, and it incorporates a great deal of automotive evolution: everything from Mark2 VW Golfs to P2 Volvos like my early XC90.
But still: that range feels right to me. Before, a lot of cars were shockingly simple and basic, and afterwards, weight, complexity, and too much electronica becomes common.
With that said, the best time to buy a new car, especially at the lower end of the price range, would be in the late twenty-teens, just before Covid, inflation, tariffs, trade wars, and supply chain issues all became a part our everyday parlance (well, the idea of inflation was common before then, as Autopians older than 50 are aware).
The best time? It was when you got your license.
Super late to this party, but I’ve gotta say late nineties.
All the good “stay safe, don’t die” stuff was standard, cars didn’t cost a year’s wages, fun levels of horsepower (~300) were becoming more common, truly crappy handling was no longer acceptable, and the only running vehicles left with carburetors were only still running because they were being maintained by the sort of fanatics who cared enough about carburetors to waste time on that nonsense. You could buy a car that was a few years old and just have fun driving it.
These are all great answers.
JDE wins this round, no contest.
Source:
My first car was an ’87 Conquest TSi
My third car was an ’88 Conquest TSi
@JDE “Reaganomics were doing some things to fix the carter era economic issues, but it was not a lot at first.”
Reaganomics fixed nothing. It led us to the K shaped society we have now.
Reaganomics objectively made American cars worse.
All glam + no substance + mindless downsizing = peak Brougham.
This is the 2nd article in a week (8 days, but who’s counting?) that’s had a Conquest as the thumbnail. That has to be the first time that’s happened ever. I feel seen!
Best era was late 90s early 00s; so many fun, reliable, AND efficient cars. Integra/Civic/Prelude, 240sx, Celicas, Chipped 1.8T VW/Audi products…