Ten alternative best cars for new drivers

We’ve got some great news for you, for once: we’re going to be driving cars for a good while yet. That’s because the prospects for autonomous cars look pretty shaky to say the least, due to the fact that a) carmakers are trying to weather the biggest storm of our generation, b) the millions now retrenched and unemployed probably won’t be looking to shell out big bucks on fancy self-driving cars in the near future and c) driving a car yourself is one of the greatest freedoms afforded to anyone in this world, and giving it up would be an even bigger detriment to humanity than the live-action version of Cats.

But what does this mean if you’re just starting out as a driver? Well, it does mean that you’re unlikely to find affordable autonomobiles at your local car dealer for a good while yet, if at all. So it’s time to pick out your own, wonderfully un-autonomous set of wheels.

Sure, if you’ve read any standard motoring advice articles, with their ‘practicality’ and ‘safety’ and ‘legitimate guidance’, you’ll know that the suggested cars for new drivers are usually small, generally front-wheel-drive and invariably with an engine so miniscule and paltry that, should you floor the throttle, it will sound like a hive of bees and make your car pour forth at the speed of honey.

What all these sensible advice articles overlook is just how demoralising so-called ‘first cars’ are. Even in modern first cars, you’ll find expanses of cheap plastic, a relative absence of refinement or features and performance that makes you wonder if that’s really the right word to use to describe the situation.

So we’ve decided to take a break from building toilet paper forts to impart some troublingly flimsy but overwhelmingly good-intentioned advice on the first cars we’d buy if this were our first time taking the plunge. Because dipping toes is for wusses.

A mid-spec i10 costs about £14,000 new. For that, you get a very modern, very reliable and, most of all, very safe vehicle, made to withstand egregious impact without imperilling its occupants.
But we think that if anything, all this safety gear makes a new driver less safe.* Why? Well, once ensconced within the safety cell of a modern, NCAP-approved hatch, there’s no sense of danger, no indication of the lethality that controlling many hundreds of kilograms of metal and plastic imbues any given afternoon.

What, then, is a new driver’s best bet? The constant reminder that life is very fragile. Preferably conveyed through the medium of a car that is itself the very model of fragility. Yes, it’s the Caterham Super Seven, the quote-unquote modern version of Colin Chapman’s original, which adhered to Chappo’s ‘lightness first and bugger everything else’ theory of automobilia like chewing gum to the bottom of a school desk.

So, the new driver will not have side impact protection, front-impact protection, rear-impact protection, rollover protection or mob-based shopfront protection. Nor can they avail themselves of traction control, ABS, electronic brake force distribution, or, in many cases, brakes that have any more complexity than a mountain bike’s.

What they will have, apart from a morbid Jiminy Cricket on their shoulder, reminding them of their limited driving experience and indeed, their mortality, is a superlative driving experience that will impart lessons that the bulk of drivers on the road today couldn’t hope to glean from their insulated safety capsules. Braking, steering, accelerating each have pronounced and easily discernible effects in an old Super Seven, and the comparatively low limits of the old live rear axles – and the incomparably low limits of the Vauxhall 1.6-litre engine – mean that all lessons are learned at speeds that would generally be survivable. Y’know, if they weren’t driving a Super Seven.

* Obviously, we don’t actually think this. We’re writing mildly amusing articles, not dispensing actual life and death advice, like on whether or not you should inject yourself with Clorox.

Fact: a lot of new drivers are also young drivers. Fact two: young people tend to have friends from school or slam poetry night or competitive spelunking or whatever it is that young people actually like to do these days.

And, unless you have an utterly repellant child, asking their entire friend group to pile into a Volkswagen Up is just a recipe for a lot of exceptionally close contact with pretty young things and the very real threat that the teenage boys will be unable to hop out, for five minutes or so, after the car pulls up.

Why not spare everyone’s blushes with something a little bit bigger? And then why not ensure that all subsequent rushes of blood go to the head, saving embarrassment entirely? Audi’s 4.2-litre V8 and quattro AWD should do the trick nicely.

By this point, you may be asking, ‘But won’t it be ruinously expensive to insure, service and fill up with petrol?’ And yes, it absolutely will. These things use many expensive parts that come from Audi in Germany. And neither the former nor the latter are exactly famous for deep discounts. And this is exactly the point! Keep your child safe in the best way possible – by keeping them far too poor to do dangerous things like take drugs, drink to excess or go to the cultural dot ball that is a modern music festival. Hell, if you do it right, they’ll be too poor to ever take the car anywhere at all! And you can’t get much safer than that.

Nearly every advice article we’ve read extols the virtues of modern, up-to-the-minute cars, bolstered with more computing technology than it took to put a small American flag on the moon and a sound system that pairs with a smartphone so the driver can be assailed with the same distracting, useless nonsense that a smartphone tends to deliver when people aren’t in cars. 

And this, in our estimation, is about as wrong as it gets for a new driver. While we’re the first to admit that a banging choon and some spirited driving goes together like gin and tonic, being inundated with tweets from twits who spout twaddle to twerps... or, um, emails and texts and stuff, is the fastest way to be yanked out of any kind of actual driving experience. You remember how people used to talk about being present in situations? The best, most genuine and most genuinely heartfelt advice we can impart to new drivers is to make the experience as involving as possible. Free yourself from distraction. Change the gears yourself. Learn to change up by feel, by ear or even by divination – however you extract the most enjoyment and involvement.

And while it’s not strictly necessary, an easy shortcut to enjoyment and involvement is to buy something classic. Stereos will just play music, not your WhatsApp messages. The engine and gearbox will be tuned to suit the car, not laboratory tests. Tyres will be narrower and kerb weights will be lower, which mean that throwing a car around for the sheer thrill of it will happen at lower, more new-driver-friendly speeds and carry less momentum, both of which lower the stakes for any, er... more committed driving moments. 

While any car older than 15 years can technically be a classic, it’s up to the discretion of the insurer as to whether it’s enough to qualify for classic insurance. So don’t try to fudge it with just any old car. Do yourself a series of favours and find an actual classic car.

If you’ve read nearly any article concerning classic cars on this site (and very possibly this exact article later on), there will be some vitriol or other about classic car values, how speculators should be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes and so on. But the thin morsel of good news in all of this is that there’s still a smattering of modern classics available within the budget and classic aspirations of new drivers. Our pick? Probably a cheap 996 Carrera and spending the rest of the budget on track days... or shares in Kleenex.

Not a lot of advice articles that we’ve read ever seem to choose a gigantic American luxo-barge as a good fit for a new driver, for some reason*. And this strikes us as more than a little mean-spirited. Are new drivers just supposed to meekly and quietly thread their little entry-level hatchbacks through town, avoiding attention in the same way that befits a mouse in a snakepit? What sort of lessons are we imparting on the next generation of drivers?

We say be bold! Be fearless! Drive a leviathan that quakes the ground and breaks up the pavement! Cruise down laneways in a seven-foot-wide behemoth that scrapes both hedgerows and make sure to never give way to oncoming traffic!

On another note, you’ll be happy to note that the Cadillac Calais was the also-ran, entry-level Caddy, so it’s nowhere near as expensive as its famous De Ville older brother. Our smooth-cruising new driver will still look every bit like a set piece in a Scorcese film, for comparative pennies. The excellent example we found is listed for 1,459,000 non-comparative, very literal pennies, in case you were curious.

*Oooh, probably insurance, cost to run, ability to fit on UK roads and park somewhere other than an airfield

Image: That Hartford Guy

The roster of saloons generally presented to new drivers is the same sort of thing that forces you to suppress expressions of exasperation and boredom when it’s your ‘Or Similar’ car at the car rental desk. Case in point: the Volkswagen Jetta. It’s fine, and does an OK job of what it’s supposed to do, but if you really think about it, it’s about as entertaining, individual and meaningful as a superhero movie sequel.

Luckily, if you need a saloon, life doesn’t have to be as bland and predictable as Captain Wow’s latest crusade against the CGI bad guys. Case in point: the Honda Accord Type R 2.0.

You heard us – ‘interesting’ and ‘Honda Accord’ in the same part of the Venn diagram. At least, when you add a 2.0-litre, 220bhp VTEC K20 engine, limited-slip diff, Recaro seats, sports suspension and the single most wonderful manual gearbox ever fitted to a sedan.

It’s a proper JDM car too, which will grant you cred in the right circles, should you be in need of said credibility with a group of people who would be complete strangers if not for buying the same type of automobile. The world is a funny place.

Fact: the original Fiat 500 was rear-wheel drive. This is a very important detail that went by the by with the modern iteration, because rear-wheel drive is the quickest shortcut to entertainment.

Yes, there are any number of fun front-drive cars – Peugeot 205 GTI, Lancia Fulvia, Austin Mini – but it’s time to talk about glorious power oversteer. None of that lift-off nonsense; we want full tail-out action for as long as our right foot (and, presumably, brain) asks for it.

In the past, the car we would have recommended at this point was something cheap, reliable, rear-drive and fun like a Datsun 240Z. But now you see the obvious flaw in this plan. Because anything old and vaguely attractive is now worth more than Fort Knox itself – let alone the gold it contains – a 40-year-old Datsun now has asking prices that better suit Aston Martins.

So, as the Americans are fond of saying, No Taxation Without Representation! No, wait, the other thing. Oh, that’s it – ‘lean in’. Or, in English, embrace the situation.

You can pick up a series of particularly beautiful Aston Martins, like the DB7 Vantage, DB9 and V8 Vantage for less than £25,000. We’d probably take the V8 Vantage, purely for its soundtrack. OK, £25,000 is enough for two brand-new, well-specced Fiat 500s, but ‘new driver’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘impecunious driver’, does it? Also, it’s half the price that we saw a 240Z listed for, because the world is just doolally.

The Kia Picanto is a cheap, reliable city car with a warranty so long, it might actually outlast humanity at this point. But before a new driver buys one, they should ask themselves the following questions:

Is your intended purchase from one of the most storied manufacturers in the business? Was it styled by Giorgetto Giugiaro? Does it have a retractable spoiler? Adjustable dampers? How about a Ferrari V8 under the bonnet? Yeah, didn’t think so. The Lancia Thema 8.32, on the other hand, oh yes.

Oh, and for the engine nerds out there, the flat-plane crank was swapped for a cross-plane crank, and the result is one of the greatest-sounding V8s we can name, all the way from its woofly midrange to its 8,000rpm redline.

OK, sure, the Thema 8.32 is the most nose-heavy thing since Pinocchio, but what price can you put on having a genuine Ferrari engine under the bonnet of your four-door saloon? None of this ‘Ferrari technology’ or ‘Ferrari-derived’ nonsense from things like the Maserati Quattroporte or Alfa Giulia QV; this is the real deal, released to a presumably bemused public way back in the 1980s. 

Yes, for the cost of what is admittedly a very good small car, you can have something that has Formula in its name! OK, so you can technically get much the same effect with a £20 tin of Aptamil, but we guarantee that our way makes for a much more entertaining drive.

So why would a new driver forgo a road-legal and comfortable hatchback for a single-seat race car that absolutely cannot be used on the road and is about as comfortable as an economy class flight?

For a kick-off, safety. If you’ve ever been to a race meeting, you’ll notice that all the cars seem to be going in the same direction. This is apparently a very important part of proceedings and it is frowned on in the frowniest possible way for anyone to contravene that. So you immediately have the distinct advantage of knowing that, on any given drive, a new driver’s risk for head-on collisions – one of the most dangerous kinds of accident – goes down immeasurably. Add in the run-offs, safety barriers and marshals and you’ve got one of the safest environments possible for a new driver to find their feet. 

Better yet, as our new driver finds those feet, and discovers how best to deploy them in an open-wheeled race car, they’ll be doing so far away from all the things that conspire to suck the joy out of road drives – congestion, roadworks, tolls and getting stuck behind people towing caravans as they limp off to Cornwall to be either bored or frozen to death.

OK, so there are one or two teething issues with our plan. The biggest, we think, is that open-wheeled race cars aren’t allowed into just any track day, which might force our new driver to go and get a race licence and attend test days, or actual races, instead. But this, in a certain mildly logical way, is even better, as our new driver will be trained and tested in the art of high-performance car control. There is a risk, however, that as a qualified race driver, that all they’ll talk about for the rest of their lives is tyre degradation and slip angles. You were warned.

No, we haven’t just sustained a severe blow to the occipital, but thank you for asking. This is a good idea, as we shall now demonstrate.

The Toyota Corolla is perfectly commodious, for a hatchback. But it’s not seven (and sometimes eight) seats’ worth of commodiousness. Nor is it mid-engined, with a supercharger and all-wheel-drive. And again, seating for seven/eight. Yes, you’ll have to hunt for one in that exact spec, but you can get a rear-drive manual version with a supercharger too. The Previa is just the gift that keeps on giving.

Also, we’re just going to put this out there: it’s the modern-day Volkswagen T2 Kombi. It’s cheap, like the Kombi used to be before a certain generation that rhymes with tumor went about keeping everything for themselves and calling us lazy because we didn’t have anything. It’s entirely distinctive to look at, too, and captures the zeitgeist of its generation with the same ease as the Kombi. The VW breathes 1960s; the Previa screams 1990s.

And, in case this was not already abundantly clear, it’s incredibly spacious, happily accommodating whatever a person needs a large amount of movable indoor space for. The rear seats also fold down to make a bed of sorts. We present this information without judgement or context. Go live good lives.

'Buy British!' we’re often told. But what is a new driver to do now that Vauxhall is owned by the French? Indeed, what were they to do after 1925, when Vauxhall was owned by the Americans?

Simple – buy something resolutely British, from its Jaguar 4.2-litre straight-six engine to its construction in Coventry by Alvis. It’s clear that, when you buy a Spartan, you’re choosing something properly British. You’re also suspending quite a bit of disbelief to come along with us on this one.

But the good news is that six of your nearest and dearest can come along for this particular ride, too – four in the back and two up front on the controls... one of which is a gun, if memory serves. Maybe give that seat to your most level-headed friend.

In more good news, it's hard to think of another vehicle as geared towards the protection of its occupants as this 10-tonne hammer that operates under the basic principles of a motorised armadillo.

And yes, these are actually available for purchase from ex-military vendors, presumably with the more capricious instruments of death removed or disarmed.

Photo: Cpl Kellie Williams, RLC/MOD, via defenceimagery.mod.uk under the Open Government License