Give Your Teen an Edge With a Safe, Used Car
As a parent, your guidance and leadership will help influence how your teenager drives. But what if you could get them in a ride that alters the odds of preventing and/or surviving an accident? The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has studied this issue, and periodically issues a list of recommended used cars for teenagers. These suggestions are incredibly helpful for those interested in the safest cars for teens.
In the last 10 years, manufacturers have packed more and more safety features into their cars. The IIHS list looks for vehicles with critical safety systems, and good crash test ratings. For example, electronic stability control, which helps drivers maintain control on curves and slippery roads, is a must have for inexperienced teen drivers. In fact, all of the vehicles on the list have this feature.
Over the years, it became obvious to IIHS that certain makes and models consistently provided rides that offered safety features designed to assist new drivers, and warn or correct distracted drivers. Couple those attributes with good crash test performance and you have the Hall of Fame nominations for the IIHS’s list of safest cars for teens. Not surprisingly, you aren’t going to find any Mustangs, Camaros, or the Toyobaru twins on this list.
So, we’ve put together some of the safest used cars you can get for your teenager once they start driving. It’s important to note that they are listed by body style, not safest to least safe. The prices we show are based on the KBB estimate for the base model of each vehicle as of 2017. Expect the price to vary slightly based on your location, the mileage and condition of the vehicle. Let’s take a look at these great used cars for new drivers, and see if there’s anything that catches your eye!
Small SUV: 2009 Subaru Forester – $9,000
Small SUVs are pretty popular, so this Subaru may be an easier sell to your kid than others on the list. It has 68.3 cubic feet of storage space, which means plenty of space for sports gear and other stuff they might need to haul around. Like all Subarus, the Forrester is AWD, which makes it a better bet than FWD in the snow or rain. Powered by a 170-horsepower engine rated for 20 MPG in city driving, and 27 on the highway, it has enough get up and go to negotiate on-ramps without being a street racer.
When it was new, there was a lot of hype on the Forrester’s safety features. Here’s why:
- Front-impact airbags for the driver and passenger designed to protect the head during a frontal crash.
- Side impact airbags for the front seats designed to protect the torso during a side impact collision.
- ABS brakes automatically sense when a tire has stopped rotating under extreme braking. The system’s modulator automatically “pumps” the brake pressure to allow the tire to rotate. This increases the vehicles ability to turn while braking.
- Electronic Stability control (ESC) senses when the vehicles handling limits have been exceeded, and reduces engine power and/or applies select brakes to help prevent the driver from losing control of the vehicle.
- Anti-whiplash head restraints react to rear collision forces and support the occupants head to reduce the likelihood of a whiplash injury.
Large Car: 2007 Volvo S80 – $5,800
You just knew there had to be a Volvo on this list, right? This is Volvo’s 2007 equivalent of a luxury car, which competes against the BMW 5 Series and Mercedes E Class. It has lots of very comfortable room inside the cabin. The base model is powered by a 3.2-liter inline six-cylinder engine rated at 236 horsepower, and is available in FWD as well as AWD. The S80 is rated at 16 MPG in city driving, and 25 on the highway.
The IIHS crash tests have four ratings with “good” being the highest. The Volvo scored “good” in all categories of testing. Not surprisingly, it is also packed with safety features. It’s easier to group them than list them individually:
- ABS, traction control, yaw control.
- Front airbags, and dual-chamber side airbags (one chamber for the hips and one for the chest).
- Adaptive cruise control that brakes the car without driver action.
- Collision warning system with pre-braking.
- Headlamps are active xenon lamps that follow the road around curves. Pretty cool.
- A key fob that can detect the presence of a human heart inside the car from a distance of 110 feet. Think about that when your daughter is leaving work in the dark.
