Richard Yarrow’s opinion for Start Rescue, providing low cost breakdown cover.

The financial pressures on drivers are huge – cost of fuel, road tax, insurance, the price of car breakdown cover. But for younger people starting out their motoring life, and – more likely – their parents, they are even greater.

My neighbour’s son turned 18 yesterday and we were having a chat over the garden wall about driving. I didn’t realise but he’d passed his test about six months ago, at the first attempt. Well done him. The lessons his parents bought him for his 17th were the catalyst for his success. It’s a story repeated up and down the country.

But his parents simply don’t have the £500 needed to put him on their car insurance policy as a named driver, and they certainly don’t have the cash to buy him his own runabout and pay the four-figure sum that his own policy would cost. So while some of his mates now have their own cars, he doesn’t. Turns out he hasn’t driven a single mile since he passed his test six months ago. He’s done what all 17-year-olds want to do – he’s done the deed – but as we all know, that’s when you really start learning to drive.

It got me thinking; how many other teenagers are in this boat? Plenty flout the law and drive with no insurance, but my neighbour would never do that. So he is now a ‘road safety time-bomb’ waiting to explode. At some point, and probably not for a few years because he’s off to university, he will drive a car on the road on his own for the first time. And in the nicest possible way, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere in the vicinity when that happens.