You've got to consider the price range of an SVT nowadays. You can get one easily for $5000 with 100K or less on the clock. For a person graduating in 1998, that WAS the price of a POS '92 Cavalier. Luxuries like power windows and locks were hard to find on teens' cars of the mid 90s, but were common on cars my friends (and me
) drove in 2001. Because in the late 90s leather and keyless entry were being included in all sorts of cars, it is now commonplace for a teenager to own one with those so-called "luxuries". Today's "luxuries" include On-Star (GM vehicles) and navigation systems ... I'll bet those will be common on teenager's first cars five to ten years from now - which is precisely the time span we're talking about for SVTs (1998-2000 cars are five to eight years old now!!)
If I ever have kids, they're going to get a similar treatment my parents did to my sister and myself: a choice, $10K limit to share a nice car, or $5K limit to get a 'decent' car each. Being that we were two years apart, I chose the $10K limit and got to enjoy a nice Contour ($8600 at a dealership) for two years till my sister started driving.
I only owned the car for about 4 months at the time and had already done about 4k in mods. It really sucks to wake up one morning and walk outside to go to work and find nothing but broken glass in the driveway. Took me a little while to recover from that financially.
