The trials and tribulations of newly licensed teenagers are well known: mailbox run-ins, gear-shift confusion and emergency-break mishaps, to name a few. But one father of a teenager has added a new one to the list.
In an Instagram video posted by the user @dave_mvc55, a father showed the unexpected source of his teenager’s car trouble: a traffic cone lodged beneath the body of the car.
“One of my teenagers came home and said their car was making a weird noise. So I went out to check the car,” Dave wrote in the video’s caption. In the clip, he looks into the camera and shakes his head.
The video has received over 71,000 likes and 400 comments, with many parents commiserating with Dave and sharing their own stories of unaware teenagers.
“I am impressed your kid told you,” one Instagram user wrote. “Mine just turned up the radio louder so she wouldn’t hear the noise. What would have been a ten-dollar part turned into having to junk the car because she ignored it. This was a car her dad and I provided. Now she owns a car she bought: She goes to the repair shop if she hears the smallest noise.”
Another added: “My daughter came home without one her hubcaps, we asked her what happened to it. She says, ‘What’s a hubcap?'”
Others discussed how the video resonated with them not only as parents of teenagers but also as drivers who should know better but have made similar mistakes.
“Not gonna lie, I dragged our garbage can all the way to their school one day. Thought my truck was breaking down,” a commenter wrote.
From these stories, one could deduce that such mishaps happen because some teenagers simply do not know how cars function or because they are distracted—or even willfully ignorant.
Boyloso/Getty Images
“When my daughter was 16, she came home with no passenger side mirror,” a user wrote. “I asked her what happened and she said—’There was a pole in the middle of the road, and there was a cute boy on the beach’—I guess the pole got the mirror.”
“This happened to me as a teen, I ran over a Christmas tree that someone had thrown out for pick up and didn’t realize what it was until I couldn’t reverse and some old man at the grocery store had to help me pull it out,” another wrote. “I notice people staring but I just thought they prob thought I was hot.”
These anecdotes aside, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit organization, reported that while teens drive less than most adults, “their numbers of crashes and crash deaths are disproportionately high.”
The fatal crash rate per mile driven for drivers aged 16 to 19 is almost three times the rate for drivers over age 20, and the risk is highest at ages 16 to 17, the organization said, citing data from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
It added that while young drivers are less likely than adults to drive after drinking alcohol, their crash risk is quite a lot higher when they do.
In the comments section of Dave’s video, some commenters argued that the type of car trouble his teen had is ageless.
“Teenagers?” one user wrote. “My 85-year-old mother did this exact thing.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.