There’s no empirically correct answer to today’s Ask, but based on the comments, it seems like Autopian readers range in age from those who got their driver’s license in the Kennedy era all the way up to drivers who took the test while Biden was President. That’s a big spread, and I’m not here to ask what year you received your permit (I think we might have already asked, actually). I want to ask what you think were the best and worst years ever in history for becoming a new driver.
Having just done an article on Boss Mustangs, it seems to me you’d be hard-pressed to choose a better time than the mid- to late-sixties.
I had a work superior who got his permit in 1966, and two years later his parents helped him to get a new Chevelle 396 coupe.
I know, I know, muscle cars have major drawbacks, but just look at that thing; easily one of GM’s best-styled mid-sizers and with tire-churning power and twenty-cent-a-gallon gas it would be nonstop fun. Plus, you could tune the crap out of it and not worry about failing emissions or a CEL illuminating. Not a muscle fan? The European choices were all over the map; you could import almost anything you wanted and not have to wait 25 years. That’s got to be the best era to hop into a car for the first time.
What about the worst? Well, I was trying to find images of a yellow VW Bug similar to the now-nonfunctional one Jason has and the car from 1984’s Footloose came up on screen (though Ren’s car was a ’72 with cool FORUMULA V stickers and Jason’s is a ’73.).
You might not know this, but Jason regularly goes to grain elevators or warehouses and dances with reckless abandon to blow off steam. Maybe he didn’t want you to be aware of that. He’s just stressed out, but if you become a Member, that will help ease his mind. Just saying.
Anyway, over at the wonderful Internet Movie Car Database, they had the vehicles in Footloose (the original, of course, since I have no idea why they did a remake). This was about the time I was learning to drive myself, and looking at those pictures from the film, I was reminded that everything was pure, unadulterated crap while I was of license-getting age. Oh, sure, you can bring up some Radwood stuff, but it wasn’t MR2s and GTIs that we usually got. No, it was awful things such as Aspen/Volares like this:
Or reliable but dull-as-Hell Toyota Coronas and any manner of Iron Duke-powered FWD GM garbage.
Novas, Pintos, U.S.-made VW Rabbits with the square lights Jason hates – that’s what we were given from mom and dad (hey, are those Mercury Zephyr hubcaps on the Nova?)
Worse than that, we often got handed ten-year-old stuff from the heart of seventies malaise like that 1969 Dart Swinger in the top shot (we had a Grandma-hand-me-down in the eighties) or this Colonnade Chevy:
I’m not asking for your pity. Well, maybe I am. It was a horrible time to be driving 55 miles an hour, tops, in horrible cars that struggled to go even that fast – or even start, in some cases. When twenty-somethings whine about how bad Nissan Versas are, I just laugh; you kids haven’t got a clue how good you’ve always had it.
What about you? What era do you think was a magical time to be a new driver? Where were the lowest points on the automotive timeline for fresh license-havers?
Topshot graphic image: Paramount Pictures
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.
As with all era’s 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.
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.
High School class of 1999. You got to party like it was, and had some of the best choices of vehicle available, 60’s to 1999.
Come one now guys are you gonna filter my post because it links to some other site’s article published 32 years ago ?!?
Way to go…
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.
Probably pre 05. But probably depends on the state. My siblings are spaced apart I had to jump though different hoops them some of them. Just depends on what state had a Karen push for nonsense. Because their kid did something stupid. Reactionary legislation is the worst. Having a car from 96 to 08 though. Perfect. The 80s junk I drove was ok just not great.
Had to be the seventies:
Probably any age before 2009- 2010 was a good time, good availability of cars that could be worked on, lower relative costs. Cash for clunkers really took out a lot of choices from the lower market though, and has shot way up.
2015-mar 2020 was OK too.
2010-2019. Used cars were at their most reliable, relatively safe if made post-2000, not everything on the road was a 5,000 pound 3-Row Crossover or pickup truck, and people were not as glued to their phones as they are now. I think framing the “best” time to be a new driver based on the cars available for cheap is the wrong way to go about it. The only criteria that should matter are in order: what was the safest, least likely to strand you in the middle of nowhere, and affordable to run in maintenance and gas, and 2000’s cars on pre-covid roads was the zenith of that.
I got my license in 2009, and I think you’re pretty much on the money. Probably 97% of cars in my high school parking lot were built after 1990, so they all had EFI and at least one airbag. And while people’s cars often had gremlins, I can’t remember any true breakdown stories. I remember lots of American cars–Luminas, Neons, Sunfires/Cavaliers, Tauruses, Centurys, Grand Ams, and Mustangs (always the V6) were most prominent. A few kids who got hand me down minivans, there were the obligatory Truck Guys, and a smattering of pre-1990 stuff mostly owned by the car enthusiasts. (I had the oldest car, my ’72 Super Beetle that I still own today. Though it wasn’t my daily.)
As you said, people weren’t on their phones like they are today. Hell, I didn’t even get texting on my phone till that year, and no one in my class had a smartphone yet. Those were the days of news stories about kids racking up $10k phone bills by texting without a plan. Of course, we didn’t know what was coming.
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 got my license in 1985 and the cars my friends and I had were poor handling gas guzzling unsafe unreliable 1960’s-70’s garbage but the rich kids at my high school had SAABs BMWs Audis, and MB so they had it good.
Probably when you were a kid with no responsibilities and a car. You just get in and go with no place to be or a rigid schedule to stick to and drive. I mean you had school and probably a part time job but your free time was YOUR free time. Everything was seen through rose colored glasses and it was great. For me it was the mid 80’s when I started driving but it’s all relative.
Arguably now. I guess the 60’s were great if you liked being impaled by steering columns and wildly unsafe cars in general.
Cars have never been safer, more reliable, better handling, more fuel efficient or just more capable in general. Even comparing my first car, a 1991 Cavalier Z24, to my sons first car, a 2014 Rav4, is absurd. There’s just no question which car I’d rather have a new driver in.
YES THIS!
Yes my Kids 2016 Kia Soul was worlds better than my Grandmother’s hand me down 1969 Ford Galaxie 500. Hell the Kia had working windows and did not need belts, hoses, plugs, starters, points and condenser every year and there is still not any real rust.
This ^^^
I’ll say 90s is when you can reasonably start a time window, due to decent enough safety regulations and cars still being mechanically simple enough to operate and service. Close that window near the end of the 2010s as cars started diverging more in methods of operation (shifter location, touchscreen bullshit in the 2010s). So, let’s say Clinton-Bush, a good 16 years. (I started learning in 2002 on a 2001 SW2 which was mechanically very similar to the mid-90s Saturns but with some modern bells and whistles, like having a CD player and not having an automatic shoulder belt.)
Many of those cars still exist and are cheaper now than ever. I have two such cars sitting in my garage as I write this.
My biggest complaint aside from the years of wear and tear is the gas mileage. They both still achieve their fine for the day EPA ratings but cars have grown far more efficient in the following years.
The mid-90’s seemed like a good time to me. I bought a pretty nice, sporty 72 Cutlass coupe with a 350 V8 for $3500 and drove it through college. Gas was still pretty cheap and so were parts.
Every era is or was. It’s a matter what you make out of it.
2010s. You had good cheap used cars still, unlike the first half of this decade, and they’re way safer and a bit more powerful than earlier stuff. Most of them are also still old enough to be DIY serviced.
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.
I am a little biased, but I’m going to say the 90’s. The cars were fairly reliable, cheap, and didn’t have enough HP to get you into too much trouble. My first car cost me $674 dollars from a salvage auction and with another $300 in parts, and $200 in frame pulls, my 4-banger, 5-speed, Foxbody notchback was ready to go.
It was reliable enough, but no so reliable to keep from learning some basic mechanic skills that have saved me thousands knowing how to do. This includes bodywork, paint, upholstery, brakes, and suspension. I am thankful no subsequent cars I’ve owned came with drum brakes though.
I learned how to correct oversteer and what brake fade was.
These comments will be on fire with survivorship bias. I will not romanticize times in the past with out 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.
Arguably right now is the best era. First cars have never been better.
And safer. Insurance costs are a bit high, though. Gas, too, I suppose.
Gas IS expensive. Good thing modern(ish) cars use it much more efficiently than the guzzlers of old.
Of course there is also the option of not using gas at all.
I imagine the people complaining the loudest about high insurance are the me and mine crowd who insist on putting their hellspawn in the most dangerous options for everyone else on the road.
If you are a straight white male, is there a better answer than the ’50s? That booming post war economy likely meant you could have something relatively cool for relatively cheap. By the time the ’60s roll around, you have awesome muscle car options while you are still early in your career. You get a nice house too, and your spouse likely stays home to watch the kids. Sure, as the ’70s creep in, the cars lose a certain something, but financially, you can get almost anything you want! Just hope you don’t lose that pension in the ’80s as the economy goes down; but if you can weather it through that, you’re basically golden. Through that time you could have owned Tri-Five Chevys, a ’68 Charger, a ’72 Estate Wagon, then into the Japanese explosion…
I’ll 100% admit this is with the benefit of hindsight and we only look at these decisions now as incredibly lucky because the cars are so so so valuable & desirable today, but there are plenty of average-ish to moderately successful guys in the 60s and 70s who were able to buy up cheap used Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Camaros, Cobras, Mustangs, etc for essentially dirt cheap. Like, so cheap that a that we’ve all heard the story of someone getting a Ferrari 250 GTO used in the early 60s for like $5,400 or whatever, which is roughly $60k today. Could you imagine getting any Ferrari racecar today for that price?
So yeah, I agree. Whatever it took took to be able to swing $5,400 on a Ferrari 250 GTO back in like 1965 or whatever it was, yeah, that is prime era to be a driver.
Could you imagine getting any Ferrari racecar today for that price?
I can imagine building something close enough for that price.
Every time I want to romanticize the 1950s and 1960s (I was born in ’93 but have been called an “old soul” countless times) I remember the “straight white male” bit. I could have been locked up, maybe committed, given my mental health and the whole not being straight thing. That and the concept of 21st century medicine gets me thinking right again.
The 90’s. You could get an older exotic or something interesting for a summer’s worth of work or get something sensible like a corolla. The 90’s had everything and it was all relatively cheap
I don’t know, but my first car was a hand-me-down teal, 1993 Plymouth Acclaim. Still loved it because it was wheels.