I don't understand the lumping of all teenagers into the all are bad drivers basket. Both of my sons were pretty careful drivers as teens but my daughter was on shaky ground. Thankfully she's improved.
While few teens have cut me off, darted out from a stop sign and so on, the same can't be said for cell phone carrying soccer moms and the elderly. The odds of me being killed by one of the latter is much greater and there has certainly been a pretty fair number of attempts at it.
When it comes to accidents a teen is far more likely to be ticketed for it than say an elderly person who does the same thing. Example. Recently an elderly woman using a cell phone crossed an opposing lane of traffic, went down a slight embankment, and smashed the nose of her almost new Camry into some trees that were lining someone's driver. Tore up the tree and did some serious damage to the car. No ticket issued for inattentive or careless driving etc and if this had been a teen the police would have cited them.
The OP knows their kid better than we do and if they look at this in an objective manner and determine the teen is a good student with good character and a safe driver then any vehicle should be safe.
We lump them there because they’re new drivers. They can be as careful as possible and still get into situations for which they are not prepared because they haven’t experienced them yet.
Drivers ed is almost universally crap. You spend more time in a classroom than you do behind the wheel, and when you do get behind the wheel most of that time is spent tooling around in a parking lot at 10mph. Very rarely do you drive in snow. Very rarely do you practice proper accident avoidance, and when you do it’s generally of the “head for that cone in the parking lot and I’ll tell you when to swerve” variety rather than the “oh crap I’m doing 65mph on the freeway and some moron doing 15 just pulled directly in front of me from the breakdown lane” type that we actually encounter on the roads.
In short, careful is great, but it takes careful + experience to make a truly safe driver.
You spend more time in a classroom than you do behind the wheel, and
when you do get behind the wheel most of that time is spent tooling
around in a parking lot at 10mph.
Lousy Drivers Ed where you live…My two oldest took drivers ed…MOST of the time you’re behind the wheel of a car driving around town or the highway…Classroom time is limited to the beginning of drivers ed going over the basic rules of the road and discussing driving theory…
But I do agree…they need a lot more training before they should get a license…That’s why I let my kids drive as much as possible when they turned 15.5 before they got their license…so that when they did get their license they had some good driving experience.