Having teenage drivers in the house can give anxious parents fits, and with good reason. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 35 percent of all deaths among 16-19 year-olds are motor-vehicle related, with the risk of getting into an accident among teenage drivers being particularly high during the first months after obtaining their licenses.
Unfortunately, few families can afford to buy their teen motorists brand new cars that are fitted with a full array of the latest safety features. Sixty percent of U.S. parents with driving-age children say they’re allocating less of the family budget for their kids’ cars and related expenses these days, according to a survey conducted by Allstate Insurance. While the survey found that 73 percent of teenage drivers own their own cars, most of them are “beaters,” meaning used vehicles with a mean age of 9.3 years.
Ideally, you'd want to choose the safest used car you can afford that performs well and is economical to own, particularly in terms of the added cost to the family’s insurance premiums, which can be substantial. The last thing you'd want to do is hand over the keys to a high-performance car like a Mustang or Camaro, which can be frighteningly expensive to insure even among middle aged motorists with pristine driving records. Safe and sane is the best approach, and even at that get ready to hold onto your wallet. “The good news is that a newer car with the right safety gear doesn’t cost much more to insure than an old car,” says CarInsurance.com managing editor Des Toups. “The bad news is that your teen will be expensive to insure no matter what he or she ends up driving.”
How expensive? Toups says parents should expect their rates to at least double, even if teen drivers simply borrow the family car; those living in one of the highest-cost states could even see them triple. “It’s not the extra car that drives up your rates,” he says. “It’s the kid.”
In Pictures: 10 Best Used Cars For Teen Drivers.
To help families with teen drivers maximize their vehicular budgets, CarInsurance.com has isolated a list of the least expensive to insure used cars from the 2008 and 2009 model years that are all estimated to sell for less than $15,000, initially earned top marks in IIHS crash tests, are rated at more than 20 mpg in combined city/highway driving and have better-than-average reported reliability. The cheapest-to-insure car that meets those criteria was determined to be the Audi A3 compact hatchback, followed closely by stalwarts like the Honda Accord, Ford Taurus and Subaru Forester.
Click through to the accompanying slide show to see CarInsurance.com's top 10 list of best models for teen drivers and their projected impact on a hypothetical family’s insurance bill over five years (until a 16-year-old driver reaches the age of 21). Average rates cited are for comparative purposes; as always, actual rates will depend on individual driver factors.
