Young, dumb, and completely incapable of driving mistake-free. We’ve all been there, some of us more recently than others, a new driver with a set of keys to ourselves for the first time. Whether you were 16 or 30 when you got behind the wheel for the first time, there’s no amount of preparation that can get you ready for real world driving around all of the other squishy and fallible humans around you. Driving on most roads, though particularly the American ones, is an exercise in surprise and reaction time. When you’re young you haven’t cultivated your own need for survival yet, so you’ll drive distracted, you’ll drive tired, you’ll drive the wrong damn way down a one-way street.
I remember being 16 like it was yesterday. My mother gifted me the keys to her old well-used 1991 Pontiac Grand Prix SE Coupe, my then-girlfriend-now-wife nicknamed it Fifi. Within the first year of owning that car I fell off my skateboard putting two giant elbow-shaped dents in the fender, I backed it into the garage door at least 25 times, I ruined the paint on the roof by ratchet-strapping my snowboard to the roof, and I ultimately totaled it just before my 17th birthday by blowing through a yield sign and swerving to avoid a head-on collision with an oncoming car only to have a head-on collision with a 130-year-old oak tree.
All of that sounds like mistakes, and they definitely were, but my biggest mistake is that I saved up $5,000 from my summer job the next year and used it to buy a 1978 Triumph TR-7 to replace the Grand Prix. That car was the single biggest piece of crap I have ever owned, and it’s also the car that I fell in love with the fastest. I still love that car and my time with it, even though it almost killed me a few times.
What’s Your Mistake?
Now that you know my deepest car secrets, I’m interested to hear what yours are. What is something you did as a young driver that you regret, or wish you could do over? It could be something as simple as wishing you hadn’t wasted money on a junker, or maybe regretting buying a nice car for your first ride instead of a beater. Or maybe it’s something bigger like the time you lost the brakes in your 1978 Triumph TR-7 and had to spin out into the median to avoid rear-ending a line of cars at a red light. It could also be something small like buying a really bad smelling little tree air freshener or something, if you’re lucky.
Around 2.8 million new drivers get their licenses every year in the U.S., which equates to around 7,700 brand new drivers hitting the road every single day. There are thousands of new drivers making thousands of mistakes on the road every morning, noon, and night, sometimes even creating new mistakes that have never been made before. At one point we were all right there in their seat, learning by doing. Sometimes you have to really mess up in order to learn what you did wrong, that’s the kind of driver education system we have here in the U.S. after all. You wouldn’t want to make it too difficult for a literal child to commandeer a 5,000 pound rolling vehicular manslaughter charge, after all we do live in a car-dependent society.
So, dear readers of Jalopnik, please tell us your young driver mistakes in the comments below. Get the conversation flowing and we’ll have a great day of ribbing each other over our youthful stupidity. Let’s hear it, who made the biggest mistake, who made the funniest mistake, and who isn’t willing to own up to their mistakes? We’re clearing the air today, folks, let’s go!
