Mike, you may be onto something with it being a stick. Other kids won't be able to drive it (easily anyway) and your daughter won't be able to text while driving or even hold the phone to her ear (easily) if she has to row through gears. She will likely not be doing much highway driving unless she lives a long way from her school.

Because it's such a small car and she will be surrounded by much larger vehicles like pickup trucks and Tahoe's, helping her understand the physics of size and weight impact on her vehicle will be important.

She will be, without a doubt, the most envied teenager at her high school!

We had another wreck just yesterday. It is the 4th time this year that we have had one of the less than stellar students from "that side of town" rear end someone else.

We have an off campus career and technology center that students go to for classes for a part of the day, the school makes everyone take a single route to and from and they must follow the busses for the students that do not drive. All three times a student in an suv (explorer, Cherokee, and liberty) did not pay attention comming to a stop sign in the line of traffic and in each case rear ended the car infront of them. Two of these occasions pushing the middle car into a third.

There are definitely benefits to buy your kids a car that brakes within a decent distance, which that does not change the fact that all of the students at fault were not paying attention and going too fast.

Just don't buy your kid a cell phone, problem solved

I was going to give our daughter the 1994 Camry we drove when we brought her home from the hospital. It was a relatively rare manual transmission model and I enjoyed the experience of teaching her how to drive a car with a manual transmission. Unfortunately the car (with 250k on it) was becoming unreliable and it did not have side airbags or ABS. I decided the side airbags were important after one of her classmates was "T-boned" at an intersection breaking her jaw and losing teeth.

So I bought her a 2006 Civic EX - also with a manual transmission. She's at college now and other kids are always asking to borrow the car. As Randall points out, most of the kids in her age group cannot drive a stick. So it is easy to turn them down. As she puts it, "It's not me, it's you." Since it is my understanding that we would be liable if someone caused an accident while driving our car, that is one less thing to worry about.

It was nice to see that a 2010 Civic (same basic layout as the 2006) survived relatively well in an accident.

I had two of the original model of the Miata - a 90 and a 94. I had too many close calls with large trucks and decided that it was time to indulge my long-term goal of buying a Porsche with the added incentive of safety.

It's GREAT to hear all is well with you and your kid's journeys.....................:cheers:

Having heard from others that it would be best if I bowed out............Good Luck to those looking for advice...................:cheers: