4KQ for a teen, yes

[Brooks Ellis <brooks@frii.com>]

>#1:If the weather is bad enough for AWD/FWD to make a difference, your 

I dunno, it snows enough around here, that having a Qmobile to drive when I
first got my license (yeah, I know - life's rough!), that it helped a LOT.
Not neccesaraly, hey, I've got AWD so I'm invincible, (Well, maybe once or
twice.. :) but, hey! Look at me! I can get out of my 20-30 degree slope
driveway and get to school and work! Look at me not stuck in a icy, sloped
parking space! (That is really obnoxious if you've got a rwd car, IMNSHO...
They should never make nose-down parking spots..) 

But, I lived out in the country, so the real roads were plowed, it was just
getting through the snow to them.. As long as one uses caution, there's not
much chance of a problem there. The worst I could do was get stuck. (which,
AWD or not, happened multiple times.. Once the snow gets much above the
undercarrige, the whole damn thing looses a LOT of foreward mobility..)

>probably doesn't belong out there.  Adults can't handle AWD/4WD 

well.. That's true.. Can't argue there. In any case, it depends on not
exceeding good saftey margins, Adult or Not.

>panic slide than a FWD car(I am repeating what I have heard from the 

I don't think so, but maybe. I've always had more success with the AWD than
the FWD in a 'panic slide'. (Non-driver induced, I assume you mean)

>new driver.  Further, start the person on an _automatic_.  Why?  It's 

You think? I don't.. My view has always been manual. If you can't figure
out a manual transmission, I have serious doubts about your capability to
drive in general. It's all tied into paying attention, and knowing how the
car dynamics work.

Of course, if you are teaching someone to drive in a crowded city, then an
automatic does make a lot of sense. I wouldn't recommend teaching anyone to
drive in a lot of traffic though. That's just asking for pain and suffering.

It's not _that_ hard to learn to stop and go without killing the engine, it
just takes some practice. Head to a rural area, give some coaching, and let
'em figger it out. Then head to some rural area with some hills, and do
some starting and stopping on hills.. Upshifting, downshifting. RPM
matching. All where you aren't going to hit somebody, and it's free of
distractions.

>asked for a license, driver gunned it(because he didn't have one), 

Duhhh... Natural selection in action.

>friends, having several friends in the car can be _very_ distracting 
>should be avoided until they've been driving for at least a few months 

That's not a bad idea, either. Having a crowd of crazy kids in the car can
seriously impare new drivers.

My $0.0195 = lots (!) of practice with coaching.

As for the car, I'd go with the 4K Quattro.. Something rather safe. (That's
my advice for most daily drivers though.. something more effective at
protecting the passengers is generally better)
brooks		-fort collins/laporte area, n. colorado-
[ brooks@frii.com    '89.5 200Q @ 1.8    S&W Sigma 9F 17+1 ]