The Best Car for New Grads

High schools and colleges will be handing out diplomas soon -- if they haven't already -- and that means a lot of parents will be considering whether to hand out car keys to help send their new graduates into the world. Even before the economy soured, buying a car for a young driver presented tough choices. Many cars that are cheap lack the safety technology parents want. Cars that have advanced safety technology often aren't cheap.

Then there's the question of reliability. And what about finding the perfect blend of safety and practicality in a car that would be really cool to be seen driving? Well, kids, beggars can't be choosers. Sometimes the best blend of safety and affordability comes in a luxury car that's three or four years old, like the 2006 Lexus ES 330.Several years ago, when I had cars to buy for my teenage children,

I devised the Eyes on the Road "Teen Car Search System." It's pretty simple: To filter out the dozens of different vehicles on the market, I use safety and crash-test information from the Web sites of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and quality and reliability scores from Consumer Reports, the nonprofit product-analysis publisher.

To further narrow the field of vehicles, I eliminated from consideration some classes of vehicles that experts at the IIHS and Consumer Reports agree are inappropriate for younger drivers: pickup trucks, body-on-frame sport-utility vehicles such as the Ford Explorer and the Toyota 4Runner, high-powered sports cars and very small cars.