The best cars of 2007 for teenagers

By Dan Lienert

updated 3:43 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2007

On Feb. 5, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) announced that Ford Motor has made changes to its $18,000 Fusion sedan, and better safety ratings — for front and side protection especially — have resulted.

Ford is, of course, delighted about this, and the company's media Web site is now trumpeting "advanced safety" as one of the Fusion's biggest selling points. The IIHS sees improvement in the model, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) gives the Fusion four- and five-star safety ratings across the board. (NHTSA works with a scale of one to five stars.)

But safety isn't the only reason the Fusion has made our list of 15 smart cars for teenagers. It is also inexpensive and has good gas mileage (23/31 city/highway, under optimal configurations). It has "very good" accident-avoidance capabilities (Consumer Reports says the most important factors in determining accident-avoidance capability are braking and emergency handling) and "much better than average" predicted reliability, according to the magazine.

What's more, it has overall manufacturing quality that is between "about average" and "better than most," according to J.D. Power and Associates.

A great choice for teenagers, no doubt. But the Fusion is just one of 15 on this year's list. All offer the market's best combination of value, fuel economy, safety, reliability and quality.

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Once again, Honda Motor's Civic stands out as a great choice for teenagers, thanks to value (base price $15,000), excellent accident-avoidance capabilities and better than average reliability.

Japanese automakers such as Honda and Toyota fear the rise of South Korea's Hyundai, because Hyundai's cars are getting better each year. This year, Hyundai's $17,000 Sonata sedan is on our list, thanks to four different five-star ratings from NHTSA, excellent accident-avoidance capabilities and overall manufacturing quality that is between "better than most" and "among the best," according to J.D. Power.

In forming our list:

• We looked at all new-model cars at the market, and eliminated from consideration any vehicle with a base price of $20,000 or higher.
• We eliminated any model that lacked, for whatever reason, an accident-avoidance rating or predicted-reliability rating from Consumer Reports, a J.D. Power rating for overall manufacturing quality or a full set of NHTSA safety ratings (meaning we eliminated any car that does not have two frontal-star ratings, two side-star ratings and a rollover-resistance rating). Not every car on the market is tested by these organizations, and not every car has all of these ratings, but we wouldn't put our kids into cars without the availability of such critical information.

• From the cars that remained, we eliminated any vehicle with below-average J.D. Power manufacturing-quality ratings, Consumer Reports predicted-reliability ratings or Consumer Reports accident-avoidance ratings.
• We made sure all the cars that remained had respectable fuel economy.
• We gave cars the benefit of the doubt and looked at their ratings under optimal conditions. For example, different engines generate different gas-mileage figures, so a car's fuel economy, as it appears in this piece, is the mileage it gets with the most-efficient engine/transmission combination.

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