We have a formula for buying our kids' vehicles. I know every family is different, and I’m not criticizing how anyone else does anything. Our formula is just the Coleman method of turning our children out loose on the highways, and so far, it has served us well. Or well enough. Or as well as can be expected when you combine kids and cars.

Michele Coleman

Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of...

First off, no matter how tempting, we don’t ever buy our kids a car that’s too affordable. Too-affordable cars fall into the same category as too-affordable farm equipment – sure to be the most expensive things you ever purchase. If a car is such a good deal that it means we keep needing to rescue it and its driver from ruin, then it costs too much. Too affordable is also a vintage pickup that doesn’t actually run but “will work for sure once you get the this or that thing fixed on it.” Too affordable is when the price is in the hundreds of dollars and the gas mileage is in the 10s of miles or less. Too affordable is when we are going to get a phone call every few weeks to tow the car someplace. As we tell anybody who will listen, any vehicle our kids drive is for our convenience, not theirs. Of course, we also want them to be safe, which arguably means they should be walking, but that’s a philosophical question I haven’t been able to navigate when it seems like every day I have seven people needing to be eight places.

On the other hand, we don’t want a car or pickup that’s too expensive. I wrote that last sentence just to see how it looks on paper. That has never actually been a problem for us – I mean having so much money lying around that we can buy status-type transportation. Still, we tell the kids, “We aren’t getting you the type of car that someone wants to date. We want you driving a car that tells you the person with you must really like you in order to be seen in it.” That’s true love right there.

Now I know there are opinions about the fact that we are the ones buying the cars. I don’t dispute that it’s a good learning experience for kids to purchase their own set of wheels, but I believe even more in leverage. I want full ownership of any vehicle my child is driving until they are old enough to sign their own papers. I need bathrooms cleaned, animals fed, rock picked and homework done, so the fact that I hold a controlling interest in the car – as in all the interest right down to the flies on the windshield – is a real comfort to me. At our house, the presence of unspoken transactions lies heavy in the air. You think you are going to that party tonight? Just how do you plan to get there if the pipe hasn’t been taken off the south hayfield?

In essence, we are solid Goldilocks car buyers; we don’t want anything too fancy or anything too junky, all we need is for a car to be just right. Just right vehicles around here can also be called “keep 'em humble” vehicles. For example, a friend of ours second-hand sold us a couple of his mother’s cars over the years. She had to have been in her 80s, and the cars she drove could best be placed in the hot rod category of “relentlessly sensible.” Low miles – she didn’t drive much. She did have a little difficulty now and again backing out of her garage, so she carved out a few long scratches and several dents in her door. In other words, her vehicles were absolutely the perfect cars for our children – the kind of cars I wanted them driving into a high school parking lot. One of them, a silver Mazda with a mismatched side-view mirror (the original having been taken out in a car wash) was infamous for its inability to surmount the smallest of snow drifts. Our lane drifts every time someone sneezes, so that little quirk was a pain, but it also meant no one who drove the Mazda had enough power to get into too much trouble.

Dave and I are really happiest when we can find multigenerational vehicles. We like knowing the provenance of the purchase. If a vehicle has been in the family longer than most of our living family members, then it sounds like we might be interested. Right now, I have a daughter driving a stick-shift pickup that was owned by her cousin. He bought it from his brother, who bought it from his brother, who bought it used with a little over 100,000 miles on it. Again, a perfect choice. How could we know that the great liability for my daughter of driving a manual transmission would be the lunkheadedness of high school boys? If she can be believed, she’ll pull into her high school parking lot ­– not using a chauffeur or any other substitute driver – and park her truck, just to have some knothead say, “Do you know how to drive that stick shift?” It makes her so mad, the entertainment value to us in the retelling might actually be worth the entire cost of the truck.

Of course, she has decided to decorate the inside of her cab in pink. Pink steering wheel cover, pink cup holder, pink octopus, etc. We drew the line at pink floor mats.

Another important thing to know about Coleman cars and trucks is that they aren’t sacred. If whatever you fit out your vehicle with can’t withstand the big five, you better not go there. The big five? Dogs, hay, mud, food on the go and every kind of boot – irrigating, cowboy or hiking – known to the farm. Of course, those boots are sure to be covered in whatever the worst thing is you can step in, so choose your floor mats with care, and anything fuzzy in the interior of your vehicle is just asking for trouble you don’t need.

And speaking of trouble you don’t need, if you see my daughter, do not ask her opinion about high school boys.