Family Feuds·
THE SLOWEST CAR PLAN
A worried family searches for the dullest, cheapest beater to slow their reckless 16-year-old daughter's driving, hoping private lessons and a sluggish ride keep the car intact.
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The car had already been totaled once, and the 16-year-old behind the wheel was only four months into her level-two license.
"My (39F) daughter (16F) is a terrible driver," the poster wrote, and the details came fast. The teen had failed her road test four times. In the short time she'd been licensed, she had caused three accidents. One of them ended with her running into a car stopped at a stop sign, "probably going 25+," and the poster said that wreck had destroyed the car.
Now the family was staring at a practical problem with a very expensive shape: the daughter kept wrecking their car, and they could not keep sending it back to the shop.
So the poster came looking for the slowest possible fix.
They wanted to buy a beater, something cheap, something sad, something that would make it harder for their daughter to keep doing damage to the family vehicle. Not just any clunker, either. They asked for "the most tired non-responsive car you can think of," and wanted it to look and feel as sluggish as possible. "I want it to sound geriatric when she steps on the gas," they wrote. "Like grandma's motorized wheelchair slow." In another line, they called it "the least exciting vehicle possible."
The plan, they said, was not to let the teenager loose on her own. They had already gotten her more one-on-one time with the driving instructor, and they would be in the car with her. Later, in an ETA, the poster made that even clearer. They said they had been replying to comments, that they had already said they were arranging 1:1 driving instruction, and that the daughter "would not be driving unsupervised or alone."
They also made one thing plain: the daughter was done driving their car.
A cheap car was still needed, though, because the private lessons required one. And where the family lived, there weren't many alternatives. "There are busses? No. Trains? No," the poster wrote. "There's not uber." They added, "It's literally nothing."
So the search wasn't for style or speed or comfort. It was for the slowest, dullest, most exhausted car on earth, one that might be just enough to keep the daughter learning without destroying the family's own vehicle again.