I was in High School in New Zealand in the 1990s and none of my friends had cars bought for them by their parents.
My own parents were very upfront: If I wanted a car, I could get a job and pay for it myself. I did and I did; it was a valuable life lesson I’ve remained grateful for.
There were a handful of kids in my wider circle of acquaintances whose parents bought them a car, but they were all very cheap, old, high-mileage type vehicles.
A teenager whose parents bought them a late model car would be assumed to be from a rich family indeed.
I don’t have a factual answer, but ISTM kids these days are not in a great hurry to get a driver’s license when they are eligible, at least in our network of suburban families.
My high school senior daughter got a reliable hand-me-down car (rather than a beater) when we determined we needed a 3rd car. She needed it primarily to get to crew after school 5 days a week. She takes a couple of team mates and they pay her for gas. She also works part time during school and more over the summer to pay for gas. We pay for maintenance and insurance.
She has worked very hard at school and her sport, which has resulted in college scholarship money in both areas, which has more than surpassed the value of the car and insurance costs. It was a good investment for us. I agree with the above post that we are enabling her success as an adult, and hoping our son (3 years younger) does at least as well.
An accurate overall statistic would be elusive I think. When I was a senior in high school in mid 1970’s I had main use of an old family car, but it remained in my father’s name, which I think is common. That was in an upscale NJ suburb where we were below average financially though still higher than national average, I’d estimate. More than a few other kids were bought a new car when they got their licences. Some like me got to use one, more or less fancy, though some didn’t.
Where my kids grew up, urban gentrifying area, kids having cars is much less common than it was when/where I was that age. Kids are less car and driving oriented. None of my kids got their licenses as soon at they could, but months to a year or more later. I gave them older cars (hand me downs or ones I bought for them) as college graduation gifts. When I was their age we went for our driving test within days of eligibility, then bugged our folks for a car if there was any way. I suppose that might still be the case in other places.
Our daughters are 17 and 19. They drive old cars that were each purchased (by me) for less than $2000. It’s a good deal for them, and a good deal for me. On the latter, I don’t have to drive them everywhere. Our 17 year old also takes our 13 year old to school every morning, and picks him up in the afternoon.
There is a downside, though: because they’re old cars, I spend a lot of time working on them.
My daughter has loved “driving” since she was ten or so and would sit on my lap and steer around in an empty parking lot. By 14 she could drive my manual transmission Jeep Wrangler off road.
When she passed her test she approached me, asking if I would help her buy a car. I wanted to teach her responsibility, so I told her I’d match her dollar for dollar for any money she saved.
Surprise! It turns out she had saved every cent she’d ever earned baby sitting, waitressing, etc. She could afford a nice car just with her savings. By “help her buy a car” she had meant take her out looking.
I matched her savings and she bought a very nice used first car.
I agree. I consider “spoiled” to not be based on what a child receives but on how the child responds to it.
A teenager who is given a car and uses it to get back and forth from after-school activities and/or part-time job is not spoiled, they’re just being supported in achieving worthy goals. I’d say they were lucky or fortunate but not spoiled.
A teenager who is given a car and uses it to drive to wild parties and other harmful or wasteful activities or drives it recklessly etc., is spoiled.
It doesn’t seem fair or accurate to me to put a derogatory label on a teenager who is doing everything they are supposed to do, just because they got a break or some help from their parents.
Wow, maybe I touched a nerve here, because while I clearly screwed up the title of the post, I thought the question seeking a somewhat factual basis in the post was pretty straightforward. Yet nearly everyone has responded with personal anecdote and/or opinion on the issue of whether or not I’m spoiling my kids. I appreciate the general opinion that I’m not, but I am still really interested in some kind of educated guess. I know my lifestyle, while not atypical, is certainly above-the-median. I was just hoping to get a sense of what that means.
Maybe I thought someone would think of a clever ballpark approach, which now that I’m stopping for a few minutes to think about it more deeply, would go something like, there are X number of families with children above some relevant income * % that have a license, compared with # of households with children that own more than two cars. I don’t have time to run those numbers, but I’ll try to do that and report back, unless anyone has a better approach.
Again, apologies for sending GQ off in the direction of IMHO.
At least we’ve bound the answer to the original question. Somewhere between 41% of teens own a car, and 69% of 19 year olds have a license. Getting granularity by household income is going to be tricky.
A couple of anecdotes: hubby had his at 17 and bought it himself (junker, $500), and I didn’t have one until 21 (gifted from parents).
For what it’s worth, giving teenagers cars was not a thing in Russia when I was growing up in the 90s. Public transportation was sufficient for most people, and those that had cars were on upper end of the income slope.
ETA: Would not think that it’s a thing in any country with half-decent public transport (large parts of Europe), either.
The problem is that this is going to vary substantially by region based on income and need. In Florida, even the cities don’t have meaningful public transportation. We have a municipal bus service in Orlando that runs on the hour only, and only runs about two dozen routes in a metropolitan area of over 2 million people. Everyone here has a car if they can afford one. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem for teenagers in that it’s very unlikely that they live within walking distance of a place of employment, but can’t get a car unless they have a job to pay for it. Parents are typically reluctant to drive their kids to work, or perhaps more importantly, to pick them up again afterwards. Obviously some do, and some kids have friends/coworkers who can take them to work. Of course, not every teenager has or even wants a job.
Not helping the GQ aspect of the question much, but at my suburban high school about 90% of seniors had cars. Obviously I’m not privy to peoples’ finances but my impression was that the majority were parent-supplied. It was a well-to-do area so lots of those were nice cars, too; there were twin girls who had matching brand new Mustang V8s. I drove my mother’s old car, a '93 Accord, which put me somewhere in the upper end of the “decent but not impressive” car group. In other words, I was never going to get a date because of my car, but I wasn’t going to be turned down by a girl because of it either.
Interestingly, when I went to college in 1999 it was one of the nicest cars in my fraternity. There was one guy who had a brand new modified Integra, and one guy with a new Civic Si, and the rest were mostly driving clunkers.
When I turned 16 (in 1980) my parents got me a 1970 Mustang. I had to make the payment ($75/month) and buy the gas. They paid the insurance. I don’t remember being considered spoiled–lots of kids in my town had cars (though I don’t remember any of them having a new or fancy one). Then again, I’ve lived my whole life in California–cars weren’t exactly a necessity, but they were pretty common. And being an only child helped.
Pretty much the same for me, but I had a beige 1984 Escort that was a hand-me-down from my aunt in 1988. Yeah, American cars really, really sucked back then. At only 70,000 or so miles, it was worthless as a trade in, so it went to her oldest nephew!
Around here it is common for kids to get a new car on their 16th birthday. Yeah, it’s that kind of area. Some kids, just to be different (!), will instead get something like a classic VW Beetle or other offbeat car.
We made sure our kids understood that we weren’t doing that. If they wanted a car, they had to pay for it, including insurance, etc. Same deal as when we were kids.
Here’s how it worked out. We set up college expense funds for them early on. They ended up using very little to none of that money going to college. So late in college there was this money sitting around that was set aside for them, they wanted cars. So they bought (used) cars with “their” money. (Note that this is of course well after turning 16.)
Oh, well.
OTOH, one of those cars, many years later, is now my primary car.
Wow. I didn’t own a car until I was almost 26 and going to grad school. I think only one or two of my friends had junkers of their own, and many of the others didn’t have reliable access to any kind of family car. Yes, there was public transportation where I grew up (first-ring Chicago suburb), but it was rare to nonexistent at night, and there were plenty of jobs that I couldn’t take because I didn’t have transportation home. I was never allowed to drive my mom’s car (she was a nervous wreck just trying to help me practice when I had driver’s ed), and my dad was a better teacher, but I was never allowed to drive his car unless he was in it. I didn’t drive a car without one of my parents in it until winter break of my freshman year of college, when a slightly insane Italian friend in my dorm decided the cheapest way for us to get from NYC to Chicago over winter break was for him to get a driveaway car (does anyone else remember that phenomenon?) and teach me stick shift somewhere on the NJ Turnpike. I didn’t drive a car alone until my mid-20s, when I rented a car for a road trip with my then-boyfriend and had to get to Cleveland to pick him up on the way.
Mostly my friends and I used bikes or our feet to get around when the buses and trains weren’t running. I can’t think offhand of anyone I knew whose parents bought them a car of any kind for their own use, in high school at least. Maybe one or two friends whose parents helped them buy a car when they went away to college.
One friend in high school had a car - this was highly illegal (you have to be 18 to drive, here in South Africa) and highly unusual even if he had been 18. Otherwise, I think it’s only in my 20s that my friends started getting cars. I myself didn’t get a car licence until I was 35.
