Chris Harris on... first car buying

There are few things more hateful than a journalist suddenly assuming that their alighting on a particular time of life means the rest of the world should suddenly have any interest in their ‘journey’. In the motoring world, this typically presents as road testing types whose normal interest in supercars suddenly switches to knowledge of Isofix access criteria the moment their firstborn arrives. As if no other human had ever before become a parent. Or had to buy a baby seat.

The travails of the parent buying a first car are right up there too. Scintillating reading this: motoring journalist agonises over what car to buy kid, endlessly shares quest with readers. Yawn.

Twenty years into finding this stuff utterly tedious I now find myself about to buy a car for my eldest child. I actually have very little interest in sharing any of this with you, but having sat through so many nauseating articles on the subject I felt I’d earned the right to offset some of the pain and spread some boredom myself. So here’s my ‘buying my boy a car’ story.

First, in the history of the motor car I couldn’t have chosen a worse time to buy a supposedly cheap car. There aren’t any cheap cars left that aren’t crap. As for nearly new – forget it, a four-year-old Polo is £50k or something absurd, and that’s assuming you can persuade someone to sell you one, which you can’t.

I don’t buy that rubbish about young people being so bad on the road

A nearly new car for a 17-year-old? Doesn’t sound right to me, nor does it fit with my own self-righteous first-motor experiences of having a £500 Mini and driving it like a moron. But responsible parenting now includes not encouraging your offspring to drive a death trap. Of course, if he chose to, I’d have to let it pass.

Insurance is a weird one. Every time I’m talking to what I’d been told was a motor insurance agent it transpires I’ve been connected to the diamond transportation underwriting department, so I hang up and giggle at the numbers being quoted.

The price of a product always contains a message. In the case of car insurance for young people, that message is: “We’d rather you didn’t drive.” Which strikes me as a little negative. And I don’t buy all that rubbish about young people being so bad on the road. I spend most of my days driving, and old spitters weaving about far exceed the number of young people exercising their right to be moronic. We all benefitted from being able to insure a car, so we should now underwrite helping the young ’uns.

Next up will come the driving lessons, which will doubtless cost about £700 a pop, after which will come some more lessons after he fails the first test – if he’s like his daddy. And then, a few weeks into driving, he’ll probably hand the keys back and tell me it was nice, but he doesn’t want to kill the planet. Before dashing off to see his pals and discussing pronouns over an avocado and edamame smoothie – recently flown in from Nairobi. Which means I’ll probably just buy something I fancy driving, because it’ll end up with me anyway.