Small cars for learner drivers?

If it must be small, anything with a high safety rating and low insurance.

My daughter's first experience driving a car was an automatic, Nissan Stagea. I think auto's are the best way to introduce them to the basics, being a more cockpit sterile environment where they are less stressed for the first few lessons.

In saying that, I learnt in a manual. It wasn't a major drama. Bunny hops and all.

My daughters main learner's car though was my Subaru Outback, manual, dual range, lots of airbags and high safety rating, for the majority of her learner's license. No bunny hops, I learn't how to teach better than I was taught :) A good handful of stalls though.

Then after taking the spare 7 seater Toyota Wish for a cruise without her parents aware, she was swapped out to this to drive and finish her learner's training on just before going for her restricted. Thus after proving it's more important to prepare them for the more difficult cars to drive sooner than later, as this one ended up in a steep ditch with a lot of 4x4's helping to recover it in the middle of no where in terrible weather. Fortunately just pretty good seat-belt bruises to show for it.

That aside, if you don't have a teenager that decides to create a story for later in life to reflect back on - when she was a kid, she got in trouble by sneaking out in another of her parents cars.....

Bigger cars are safer in my opinion (apart from when they are breaking the rules). Both can be fixed. If we went straight to the people mover, she would have been more experienced from the get go with larger vehicles, just like her experience driving a manual car first.

Then when they buy their own car... you can look forward to something like a Volvo coupe with fully automatic pedestrian protection with $50 indicator bulbs! This became her daily driver and used this to pass her full last week. The bayonet pins on the indicator bulbs are in stupid asymmetric locations. Something a metal file now fixes on a normal symmetric pinned $5 bulb with the same based width since no one stocks them in NZ. On to the next lessons in life - why your father always says come and ask me first, but her wallets learning that lesson the hard way.

Basil12

kiwirock