These Are The Youth-Focused Car Programs Our Readers Would Create If They Didn't Have To Worry About Money

The Story

The kids don.

Which is why, on Monday, we asked you which youth-focused automotive programs you’d create if you didn’t have to worry about money. The kids don’t want to drive, no one they know owns a manual they can learn on, and we could fix it all if someone with enough cash swooped in to implement our best ideas. Surely, Jalopnik, of all the car blogs, has readers who know what they’re talking about. So let’s take a look at some of the most popular answers.

I have a bachelors degree, but I recognize that the high school to college pipeline for white collar employment may be irretrievably be broken. If schools are honestly preparing students for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in America, they should be preparing students for real life opportunities rather than training them to end up as over-educated coffee baristas and Uber drivers.

I would think locally. I know there’s a youth program in my town and while it’s the typical arts and tech stuff for the kids to learn, it can’t hurt to introduce a program about car repair. Buy a clunker and all the parts needed to get it on the road, and go through the basics to the advanced parts of car maintenance and upkeep. When it’s all fixed up, the car is sold and that money is used to buy a new car and parts for the next car repair program.

So this might be hard to phrase, but I’d create a program that would be an outreach to middle and high schools and encourage them to get into a training program whose sole purpose would be to assess the driving talents of these 16 and under students and see who might have a future and fund/develop them so it’s easier to break into the higher levels of stock car/open wheel/rally/Formula 1-3 racing. A lot of stories I see are about kids of racing dads and of course they are given the opportunities as that’s how they grew up and their dad is a top-tier racer who can open all of the doors and fund whatever they need. Let’s give the middle class kid from suburban Cincinnati who has an undiscovered top tier skill for driving but no opportunities the same opportunities that a Busch kid would have.

Ishchuk Grygoriy/Shutterstock If you’ve ever heard of FIRST Robotics, I’d develop a similar organization to get kids into motorsports. I was a part of our school’s robotics team in high school, and it was a pretty big organization. There were separate teams for mechanical, electrical, coding, design, and marketing, plus an a/v team that had a separate animation competition. There was something for pretty much anyone that wanted to get involved.

This could be translated perfectly to motorsports, with teams competing in Lemons-style races. There would be drivers, pit crew, mechanical, finance/accounting, marketing, and film teams, locally sponsored and supervised by advisors. There could even be a younger, say middle school, version that’s focused on karting. It would teach that motorsports isn’t all about the driver. Mechanical and pit crew would learn car repair/modification, finance/accounting would handle the budget and sourcing parts, marketing would recruit sponsors and design merch to sell, and film would create social media posts and long-form content about the team’s season.

Why It Matters

So this might be hard to phrase, but I’d create a program that would be an outreach to middle and high schools and encourage them to get into a training program whose sole purpose would be to assess the driving talents of these 16 and under students and see who might have a future and fund/develop them so it’s easier to break into the higher levels of stock car/open wheel/rally/Formula 1-3 racing.

CarMotion Daily’s Take

The kids don’t want to drive, no one they know owns a manual they can learn on, and we could fix it all if someone with enough cash swooped in to implement our best ideas. Watch this space over the coming weeks. Supply chains, regulations, and consumer demand are reshaping the playbook faster than five-year plans can keep up. Dealer networks and service capacity will need to evolve alongside whatever the headline announcement implies. Regulatory filings, supplier contracts, and any production-volume adjustments usually trail the headline by a quarter or two. Stock price moves and dealer council chatter are leading indicators worth monitoring.