Cassette Tapes and Driving Licences

When freedom was just an old banger and Vanilla Ice.

The McDonald's car park at half eleven on a Tuesday. Four of you in a Fiesta that smelled of wet carpet and something electrical nobody ever located. One shared hot apple pie going round. Nowhere to be. Nowhere you'd come from, particularly. You'd just driven there because you could.

That was it. That was the whole point.

Passing your test was a rite of passage in a way that's hard to explain now without sounding like you're romanticising it — which you are, but only slightly. It meant you could just go places. No more missing the last bus. No more asking. You filled the tank with £4.64 in change and you left.

The car was awful. A Fiesta older than you, with a cassette player that chewed every tape. A Renault 5 with a hole in the floor — 1990s air conditioning. A Fiesta XR2 with one working speaker and a heater with one setting: freezing. It broke down at least once a month and your mate's dad always got it back on the road and you never once questioned what that cost him.

The rear view mirror came off every other week. There wasn't a glue on earth that could hold it.

Insurance was creative. You were a "named driver" on your dad's policy. He was the "main driver" despite never touching the car. Everyone did this. Nobody questioned it. The alternative was £1,500 to insure something worth £600, and you were seventeen with a paper licence that had cost you £4.

The tests were flexible too. Clutch broke during one. Exhaust fell off during another. Stalled at a roundabout twice and the examiner sighed and ticked the box anyway. In the eighties the working rule was simple: if you didn't cause a pile-up in the first twenty minutes you had a reasonable chance.

Half the nation would fail now inside five minutes. Both hands on the wheel? You're having a laugh.

But the freedom felt enormous. Even though most of us just drove to McDonald's, or picked someone up so we could drive them home again, or went nowhere in particular. Just around. Do you remember that? You actually just drove around. The destination wasn't the point. The point was you could go.

Late-night drives talking rubbish. Parking badly in a lay-by and pretending you knew what you were doing. Feeling like an adult even though your mum was still waiting up.

Now only about a third of 17 to 25-year-olds hold a licence — the lowest proportion on record. Not because they don't want independence. Because independence has a different price tag. Lessons run at thirty to forty pounds an hour and you'll need the best part of forty-five of them. Insurance for a seventeen-year-old in a Corsa starts at two thousand pounds. Add a half-decent car. Add the provisional, which is now thirty-four pounds when ours was about four. The maths doesn't work and they can see that.

We love saying kids these days don't want freedom. They do. They just don't think it arrives in the shape of a rusty Corsa with a nine-hundred percent insurance premium, and they're not wrong.

We're hardly in a position to judge anyway. We were the generation that didn't wear seatbelts properly, squeezed six people into a five-seat car, thought two pints was fine, and learned from uncles who said things like "just feel the bite, son." We talk about standards dropping. Meanwhile if you didn't pass in under ten lessons your mates took the piss.

A nineteen-year-old today can get most places by train or Uber. They can socialise without leaving the house. They can work without commuting. The urgency has changed. The ambition hasn't.

Driving used to be the first real taste of autonomy. Now it's just an option — still essential outside cities, still expensive everywhere, still carrying more meaning than the object probably deserves.

Most of us over fifty are back in learner mode anyway. Not in cars — in careers, in technology, in health, in whatever comes next. We're all quietly revising something.

And we all occasionally wonder if we'd pass the test first time now.