Your teenager wants a car. Here's what you're actually deciding.

Most of this site talks to the person who's going to drive. This page talks to the person who's going to co-sign the decision — and, often enough, pay for part of it.

There are two questions behind every first car, and they pull against each other. Is it safe enough? And what does it really cost — not the price in the advert, the year. Below is what our data can honestly say about each, including the places where the answer is “we don't know, and here's why”.

Nothing here is a recommendation and nothing is a quote. We publish estimates built from public data, we show the working, and we say when a figure is thin. Vouched doesn't sell cars, doesn't sell insurance and doesn't give insurance advice — when you're ready for a real number, we introduce you to authorised providers.

What our figures are, in your terms

• Insurance — an expected annual premium for a new driver on a comprehensive, black-box policy, calibrated against published young-driver premium data. It is an estimate for planning, not a quote, and the range beside it is how much real quotes vary from person to person.
• Cost to keep — insurance plus road tax, fuel and the MOT fee, for a year. It excludes servicing and repairs, and we say so everywhere it appears rather than quietly rolling them in.
• Safety — Euro NCAP results as published, with the year of the test attached. We never convert a rating into a score of our own.
• Price — the typical asking price for the model, mostly the median of a large sample of live listings. It tells you whether an advert is in the right area, not what that specific car is worth.

Safety first — and honestly

Of the 164 cars we track, 123 carry a Euro NCAP result and 41 have never been tested. But the more useful split is by when: only 18 were tested from 2020 onwards, under the protocol generation in force today. For 89% of these cars — 146 of 164 — there is no current-protocol result at all.

That is a fact about the used first-car market rather than about any one car. Euro NCAP has raised its bar repeatedly; a five-star result from 2012 was awarded against tests a 2022 car would find easy. So the three tables below are kept apart on purpose. We rank cars within a testing regime and never across one, because a star from one decade and a star from another are not the same unit.

Tested under the current tests

18 cars, best result first. This is the strongest evidence on the page.

Tested, but under earlier tests

105 cars carry a result from before the current protocol generation. Showing the 25 strongest and most recently tested. The year is printed beside every rating — an old five stars is still a five, but it is a five from that year's test, not today's.

Never tested by Euro NCAP

41 cars, listed alphabetically — not ranked, and not placed below the tables above as though they had scored badly. Euro NCAP tests a sample of new cars each year and cannot test every model, trim and generation; a car being absent from its database says nothing about how it performs. It only means we have nothing to show you, and we would rather say that than put a zero where a fact should be.

If your teenager is set on one of these, the checks that are possible matter more than usual: the model's MOT failure history, this specific car's MOT record, and what an independent inspection finds.

Figures checked July 2026

The cost column above is an estimate based on public data, not a quote, and Vouched does not give insurance advice. Euro NCAP results are reported as published, with the year of the test; we don't convert them into a rating of our own. When you're ready, we introduce you to authorised providers for a real quote.

The first year, totalled

The number that surprises parents is almost never the price of the car. Fill this in for whatever they're looking at, print it, and stick it on the fridge — or print it empty and fill it in by hand while you're both looking at adverts.

It totals only the lines we can actually price. The costs we can't are listed with the rest, with the figure column left honestly empty, because a total that quietly drops them isn't a smaller number — it's a wrong one.