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[quote=Anonymous]Have you actually done any car shopping? That may factor in as well when you actually look at what's available and the price points. We are in the same boat, with a 15YO who just got her permit earlier this summer. I drive a 2018 minivan with a nice trim package, DH drives an older GMC Canyon.

We at first thought we wanted a car we could get for less than $12-15K but we figured out pretty quickly that we needed to raise our price range to $20K-$22K to get something with less than 100K miles on it that we felt had a good amount of life left and wouldn't be a money pit. I don't know if we'll send DC1 to college with this car or keep it around for DC2, but we didn't want a beater, though I totally get why people would go that route with a teen.

We started looking at older Subarus but even used, it was hard to find one at that price/mileage point -- most had way more than 100K miles. Expanded to other small SUV-styles and considered things like the Honda HRV, Buick Encore. DH has been keeping an eye out for around 8+ months to see if something popped up that he could jump on, we weren't in a rush, but the conditions/prices have stayed pretty consistent. With so many car loans being five+ years now, by the time vehicles get to the used car market, they typically have at least 50K miles and often more like 100K.

What we ended up buying a couple of weeks ago was a 2015 Acura RDX with 50-some thousand miles on it. So older, but decent on mileage and yes, a luxury brand. It is far nicer than either of our first cars and really, nicer than we wanted for a teen driver that we expect will have at least some kind of fender-bender at some point. But it was cheaper than other, non-luxury Hondas and other models we looked at. DH also pointed out that with the luxury models, chances are a bit better that whoever owned the car had the means & motivation to keep it maintained. The features are a bit dated, but for a new driver, I think the safety features are satisfactory and in fact, I like that the center screen is small with limited functionality and that most things are controlled by physical buttons rather than sifting through multiple touch-screen menus.

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