Boomers and Gen X are always complaining that the Kids These Days don’t love driving enough. And yet, when an enterprising 13-year-old takes his family’s Volkswagen campervan for a 70 mile-per-hour joyride along Britain’s A35 highway through the town of Poole, they fine the kid and put points on the license he’ll eventually, inevitably, earn. Make up your mind, folks! Do you want kids interested in cars or not?
The news comes from The Guardian, which reported on the penalties that the unnamed teenager received for the 2 a.m. excursion on which he embarked late last August: Six points on his eventual license, and a debt of $143 in court fees. The cop who pulled the kid over even commented that “There was nothing remarkable about the driving” — this teenager clearly knows what he’s doing!
UK licenses don’t make any sense anyway
This driver was 13 years old, which makes him too young for a license — UK teens can get a provisional license at 15 years and 9 months old, similar to what many U.S. states require, but they can’t actually drive a car alone until 17 years old. With staged licensing this confusing, is there any wonder kids are circumventing the whole process and taking their parents’ cars for joyrides? The kid said this sojurn wasn’t his first rodeo with the campervan, and something tells me that — despite his statements to the contrary — it won’t be his last.
Surely this is a simple case of a young car enthusiast stymied by Britain’s byzantine bureaucracy, unable to parse the complex and interrelated licensing structure, and deciding to simply go it alone. He’s not a perpetrator of some crime, with his unremarkable — read: capable — driving, he’s a victim of a system that wants him to stop being into cars. If you Boomers and Gen X are truly so concerned about car culture dying out, maybe figure out the institutional barriers you’ve put into place that make getting behind such a struggle. Well, getting behind the wheel legally. Obviously this kid’s got the logistics figured out. Let him play, coach.
