Teenage Dream

November 1st, 2024 Newsletter Archives

When I passed my driver’s test in Philadelphia 1978, I was behind the wheel of an absolute boat of a car, my family’s 1971 olive green Plymouth Fury III. The thing was so big that we used to call it Sherm, as in, Sherman tank.

My parents made the ill-advised decision to let me drive Sherm to school a few days a week. On the way home, I would regularly fill up Sherm’s capacious backseat with 6 or 7 people, thus relieving my pals from having to take the bus, while putting them all in mortal peril. We had two rows of passenger seating, but no third row – we had one layer of teens on top of another.

Safety was not inherent in our thinking.

In recognition of the fact that teen brains tend to be, well, less than fully developed, General Motors created Teen Driver mode, which among other things allows parents to prevent the car from shifting out of Park if the front seatbelts are unbuckled. It mutes the audio system until the front-seat passengers are buckled. And Teen Driver disables Super Cruise, GM’s driver assistance technology, and in some cases limits the speed of travel. Sherm would be appalled.

– Eric J. Savitz, editor-in-chief, GM News