20 Things Teen Drivers Once Did That Would Horrify Parents Today

To fill the gap in adult drivers, rural and suburban school districts employed their own students. State highway patrol officers would train and license 16- or 17-year-old high schoolers to drive an official school bus along a daily route. Over 80% of all school bus drivers in North Carolina were teenagers. The job only became off-limits once commercial license rules professionalized the industry decades later.

For much of the 20th century, there was no national driving age. Instead, each state had its own rules. In South Dakota, 14-year-olds could get a full license, meaning no restrictions on night driving, highway driving, or traveling across state lines without an adult in the car. In Texas and New Mexico, you had to be 15 even for a limited license, while Kansas let 14-year-olds drive with a limited license restricted to farm-to-school trips. In Pennsylvania, you couldn’t drive at all unless you were 18. That’s been the rule since the start of the 20th century.

Until well into the 1950s, you could buy an American car without seat belts, or even lap belts, or any kind of restraining device. Car companies assumed people wouldn’t want to buy cars equipped with the visible trappings of danger. Lap belts were offered as an option for a time, but Wisconsin didn’t pass a law requiring them in new cars until 1961, and a federal law didn’t do so until 1968.

Drunk driving was a crime in all states prior to 1960. New York’s first DUI statute was enacted in 1910. But most states lacked any form of open container law, meaning that as long as the driver was not intoxicated, leaving an open bottle of beer or liquor in the front seat would not be considered a traffic infraction. It took until 1998 for the federal government to urge states to adopt open container laws.

Back in the 1930s, a driver’s license was more paperwork than it was proof of ability in states such as North Dakota and Texas. Teens could walk into a county clerk’s office to sign a piece of paper, or send it through the mail to the state capital along with 25-50 cents, and have a paper driver’s license sent back to them. No vision test, no written test, no road test. State by state, the licensing process became stricter through the late 1940s as highway patrol forces and actual infrastructure began to take shape.

Pickups were common family cars throughout rural and suburban America, and state vehicle laws defined the truck bed as nothing more than a storage area for unregulated cargo. As a result, young drivers frequently transported multiple friends while driving on highways, all sitting in the back without seatbelts, some riding on top of the wheel wells, tailgate, or sideboard. There was no law against it. It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that states began to pass laws prohibiting it as the dangers of passengers being ejected from the bed became more apparent.

The rumble seat was a backup passenger seat that was hinged onto the rear trunk area of older coupes and roadsters. People would sit on this backup seat when they traveled, yet they were completely unprotected from the traffic and wind outside, since there was nothing around them. Factories stopped building these in 1939, but teenagers continued to purchase them in the years following and drove their friends in these open seats at highway speeds without any belts, walls, or rollover protection of any kind.

Today, graduated licensing laws typically prohibit teens from driving unsupervised during certain late-night hours, usually from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Before graduated licensing was implemented in the 1990s, a driver’s license meant you were free to take to the streets at any time of the day or night on any public road, and no chaperone was necessary.

In 1935, Amos Neyhart, a State College, Pennsylvania, teacher, started what was probably the nation’s first public high-school driver-ed program. In the ’50s, thousands of other high schools were doing the same, and local car dealers donated brand-new cars with a second brake pedal for the teacher. The students, sometimes just 15 years old even in states like Pennsylvania where the minimum driving age was otherwise 18, would take the cars out on the street under the teacher’s supervision for their driving lessons. Many were rewarded with fee waivers or discounts on insurance if they passed.

The cars of the mid-century had continuous wide bench seats up front and in back that were built for seating three or four abreast. Since state licensing laws did not place any limits on the number of passengers for a teen driver until the 1990s, it was not uncommon to find six to eight teenage occupants sitting on a bench seat during a night of driving around town. There was no cap. Today, graduated licensing rules usually allow new drivers only one non-family minor passenger.

In the early 1900s, driver’s licenses were primarily meant to collect fees and keep tabs on registration, not to determine whether or not someone had the skills to operate a motor vehicle. Rhode Island passed the first real driving test in America in the early 1900s, but other states took years to follow suit. In fact, South Dakota was the last state in the nation to require a road test, not doing so until 1959. Before that, people in the state could apply for a license without ever having taken one.

Before 1968, new cars built in America were equipped with solid sheet-metal dashboards, often painted the same color as the interior. They also had hard knobs that stuck out, non-safety glass, and steel steering columns that weren’t collapsible. The result was that during an impact such as a front-end collision, all that solid metal drove straight into the occupants’ chests and heads, without cushioning the blow.

Massachusetts passed the first compulsory auto insurance law in 1927. No other state adopted it for almost 30 years. New York and North Carolina didn’t require it until 1956 and 1957, respectively. Until then, in the other 47 states, any teenager was free to buy a car and register it, drive it around town without an insurance policy on file anywhere, and pay whatever damages resulted from an accident via a civil suit.

From the 1910s through the late 1930s, cars had wide steel running boards below the doors, originally intended as a step up into a high-clearance automobile. Instead, teenagers rode them like this, holding on to the frame of the door or windowsill while the car drove ahead. By 1941, car companies no longer put running boards on new car bodies, and states soon outlawed riding on the outside of a car entirely.

Prior to the latter half of the 1950s, an American driver’s license was a simple paper or thin cardstock card that listed your height, weight, hair color, and address, but had no photo attached. It wasn’t until 1958 that California began printing photos on licenses, and most other states did not do so until the 1970s. So a mid-century teenager’s ID was really just a written description, leaving it to an officer’s judgment to decide whether the person matched the card.

Drinking and driving was illegal in all states long before 1960, but it was difficult to prove. There were no scientific roadside tests for blood alcohol, as standardized field sobriety tests weren’t developed until 1977, and breathalyzers were not widely used on the side of the road until after 1960. So police would gauge if a suspected drunk teen driver could speak clearly, maintain their balance, or smelled of alcohol, then confirm it at the station or hospital with a blood test.

A few states, such as Nevada and Montana, had no specified daytime speed limit on open rural roads. Instead, they required drivers to travel at a “reasonable and prudent” rate given the weather and conditions. A teenage driver driving through rural Montana during the day would not have seen a limit on the sign, but could have received a ticket for reckless driving if a police officer thought they were speeding. Montana was among the states that retained this law from 1955 to 1974, when the 55-mph federal speed limit was established.

Child safety seats weren’t crash-tested until the late 1960s, so there was basically nothing a teenage driver could do to protect a baby or toddler sibling in an accident. Babies rode unrestrained on a parent’s lap or standing up on the back seat, sometimes in hook-over canvas bassinets that were supposed to keep a toddler from crawling around but did nothing to save them in a collision. It wasn’t until 1978 that Tennessee passed the nation’s first child-restraint law.

Today’s graduated licensing system requires teens to hold a learner’s permit for several months and complete dozens of hours of supervised driving before going it alone. But that wasn’t a thing until 1995, when Florida introduced it. There were basic learner’s permits before then, but once a mid-century teen turned 16 and passed the application or test, they left the DMV with a full license in hand the same day. There was no waiting period and no logging driving hours.

Post-World War II cruising was made possible by cheap gas, around 20 or 25 cents a gallon, and the rising number of cars per capita: You would drive slowly and repeatedly around the main street of town, and pull off at the drive-in theater. Drive-in theaters went from a few dozen before the war to more than 4,000 by 1958. Kids could hook up the big, wired speaker boxes to their car windows. There were no cell phones, GPS, or anti-cruising laws to track your location.

This content was created with the help of AI.