Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuog
I've found that much of the worst driving of the teenage years will happen in the safest car you have access to, when it starts feeding that wonderful invincibility factor.
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Wait, what? How is that even remotely generalizable? Surely that's an oversimplification that we shouldn't take to heart. As a counter-anecdote (that proves nothing, but hopefully underscores my point that this is not a good theory), I suspect that the worst driving I ever did was in that Buick Regal. That's the car I learned to drive with, but also the car with the fewest safety features—our other car, a Chrysler minivan, had ABS, 2 airbags, traction control and was seven years newer. Plus it outweighed the Buick by a thousand pounds. The Buick just had ABS, and suffered power steering and alternator failures during the time I drove it, not to mention a (temporarily) jammed transverse leaf spring and a dragging brake caliper. It even had the wacky American-style unpowered automatic seatbelts in the doors that made the structural integrity of the door a prerequisite for not getting ejected out the side. There's no way the Buick was the safer car.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuog
A first car is a very personal thing and it will be hard for people to really point you in the right direction without knowing you, and to some extent your family. The "safety" of the car will make a huge impact in this area. It will have a lot to do with yours and your families views on handling risk. Personally I don't like to rely on passive systems that can get in the way of my control of the vehicle, for that reason I drive manual transmission cars, no airbags, no ABS(though I don't have much of a problem with this one, I just don't see it as particularly important), no traction control anti-roll etc.
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This is amusing because, with regard to ABS and traction control, those are actually
active systems that only marginally decrease your control under normal circumstances, and
dramatically increase your control under extreme circumstances.
Manual transmission is even worse, safety-wise: it decreases your positional control (hands keep coming off of the steering wheel or sliding along its rim to turn it, and more chance of being in an inappropriate gear to avoid an obstacle), and only slightly increases your engine control and efficiency.
Airbags have no impact on your control, unless you plan to be running into things that would ordinary deploy them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cuog
Do you want something you can learn to work on/become mechanically competent(maybe you're a gear head). For a first car for this group I'd recommend an old air cooled VW, beetles are the cheapest and easiest to find, but there are some other body styles to go for too if you want. These will be manual transmission, very simple cars and will lack all computer controls and silly safety gizmos. They will however make you learn how cars work, and make you a better driver as you're forced to pay attention to the road.
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That's kind of the problem, though—cars
don't work that way anymore. A Bug is a 60 year old design. Essentially no car from this century uses air cooling, or torsion bar suspension, or the spare tire as a pressure reservoir for the windshield washer system. Sure you can learn about the way cars used to be, and can even tinker with it to your heart's content, but if that's the goal, find another Trans-Am instead—because it might actually be fun and challenging to drive (once you drop a crate engine into it to replace the energy-crisis version).