The best car to buy for your teen

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jun 25, 2006 | by Joseph B. White The Wall Street Journal

This year's crop of high-school graduates is one of the biggest since a gazillion boomers graduated from high school in the late 1970s. In many of these millions of households, celebrating a high- school graduation means buying a car.

But what kind of car?

You could ask your graduate what he or she wants to drive. Sure. According to research by kbb.com, the new- and used-vehicle information site, the No. 1 used vehicle desired by 16- to 25-year- old drivers is the Ford Mustang. No. 2 is a Jeep Wrangler, and No. 3 is a used Honda Civic.

If you ask safety experts at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, they advise you to buy none of those vehicles for a young driver. The IIHS's consistent advice is to buy your teen a car that is large, low and slow. This isn't what most parents do.

Researchers for the IIHS did a survey of three high-school parking lots in Connecticut, Virginia and Mississippi, and found that on average more than half the cars in the student lots were cars the institute wouldn't recommend, including small cars, SUVs and pickups. Among 2002-04 models found in student parking lots, roughly half were small cars and about 30 percent were SUVs.

"When you get in a crash in a smaller car you are twice as likely to die," says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the IIHS. As for SUVs, she says, teens tend to like them, but crash statistics indicate that SUVs and teens are a bad mix.

Ferguson's check list for buying a car for a teen: Look for a midsize or larger car. Look for a vehicle that isn't too old, and has front and head-protecting side air bags -- as well as stability control, if available and affordable. Stay away from SUVs and pickups. And don't buy a sporty car or a performance car.

That last point may require the determination to resist lots of pleading. Who doesn't want a cool ride like a Mustang? To settle the argument, just ask your insurance agent to give you a quote for coverage on a Mustang with a teenage driver. I plugged my daughter's profile into an online insurance-quote tool and got back a rate of $3,091 for six months on a Mustang coupe (not the torqued-up GT version, either). The monthly payment for that would have been a mere $584 a month after a $777 down payment. Perhaps you could get covered for less, but you won't be saving "a bunch of money on your car insurance."

In an attempt to make sense of this, I took information from three sources to find out if one could correlate measures of safety, reliability and desirability to create a short list of teenworthy vehicles.

I started with the IIHS's Web site (www.highwaysafety.org) and looked at safety ratings for small, midsize, large and near-luxury cars. I left out the SUVs and pickups, because young, less- experienced drivers are more likely to make the kinds of mistakes that could cause a vehicle with a high center of gravity to roll over. The IIHS and Consumer Reports (www.consumerreports.org) agree that SUVs and pickups are a bad choice.

Plenty of kids, of course, are driving around Ford Explorers. Many families have Explorers (or similar SUVs) that used to be the main family wagon. When the parents decide to get a new ride, the easiest solution is to give the teen the old Ford. But that isn't the solution safety advocates recommend. Beyond the safety questions, your teen will likely do a lot of whining about pain at the pump.

Then I looked to see which of the models that got high marks for crash-test performance from IIHS also got good scores for reliability from Consumer Reports, which has its own list of cars it recommends for teens.

Finally, kbb.com sent a list of new vehicles priced under $20,000 that could be had with side-curtain air bags.

It's easy to find conflicting advice about what makes a vehicle right for young drivers. Consumer Reports and the IIHS agree that cars for young drivers shouldn't be too fast or too sporty. Consumer Reports says its list of recommended young drivers' cars doesn't include cars with 0-60 times faster than eight seconds, or slower than 11 seconds.

Consumer Reports suggests several relatively small cars, such as the 2002 or later Ford Focus sedan and the Toyota Corolla, on grounds that bigger, heavier vehicles can have sluggish handling. The IIHS favors larger cars, on grounds that the more space and metal around you, the safer you are in a crash.

Put it all together and here are some vehicles that stand out.

The Honda Civic. The new model with side air bags is a top safety pick for the IIHS. It gets good reliability scores from Consumer Reports. And the 2006 model is listed by KBB as one of the coolest cars under $18,000. It's one car that scores well with both young and old in KBB's polls. The Civic is also very fuel-efficient.

The Ford Five Hundred. Sure, it's bland on the outside. But it rates a Gold Top Safety Pick rating from IIHS, its underpowered six- cylinder engine is a plus for young drivers, and it gets an average reliability rating from Consumer Reports.

Midsize Japanese cars. The 2006 Subaru Legacy got a Gold Top Safety Pick from IIHS. Older models got "good" front-impact scores, but marginal side-impact scores. Consumer Reports rates the Legacy better than average in reliability. Consumer Reports also recommends the Honda Accord (1998 or later) and the Toyota Camry (my daughter ended up with a 1997 four-cylinder Camry two years ago). New Accords and Camrys are easier to get with side-curtain air bags, though they usually aren't the cheapest midsize cars around. The IIHS hasn't rated the new Camry's side-impact performance, but it gives the car a good rating for front collision, and spokesman Russ Rader says IIHS would recommend a Camry for a teen.