When did you learn to drive? For Cassandra, the main character in The Rock Star’s Wife series, it wasn’t until she was both 18 and a high school graduate. This rule applied to her siblings and cousins as well. I pulled it from real life, as that was my parents’ rule. The rationale was that high students are not mature enough to drive. Cassandra did achieve her license in time to drive across state to attend college. Let’s take a look at 1990s car trends.
“Clinton-era cars are definitely hot right now, and that makes sense when you look at the market conditions,” car culture website Hegerty says. “The folks who took their driving test in the mid-1990s are now in their 40s. The cars themselves are 20-30 years old, and the cruel forces of attrition (rust, wrecks, neglect, etc.) have taken their toll.”
The vehicles, the website says, have remained affordable and are excellent collector cars for nostalgic Generation Xers. While prices for other vehicles have gone up, ’90s cars cost as low as $11,000. The decade was characterized by American cars that didn’t provide much regarding performance while Japanese vehicles had their golden age.
Cool 1990s Car Trends You Probably Didn’t Have
1991 Chevrolet Lumina. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The 1990s “was a time of extreme experimentation with car designs and technologies and birthed some of the weirdest and most unique vehicles of the past century,” Hot Cars website says. “There was a wide amount of technology that was available which hadn’t been before, and the culture of the world was changing because of it.”
Here are some examples.
My heart pumping, I look out the window above the sink as if expecting to see a stranger in the driveway. A menacing stranger with a car phone. – Sexual Awakening, Chapter 2
Car phones were technologically revolutionary and a status-symbol accessory found in high-priced vehicles.
Power door locks and power windows existed in the 1990s, but most of us were still cranking our windows open and closed and opening doors individually with a key.
Pop-up headlights were very cool. Who didn’t want to see a car “open its eyes” when the engine started?
CD players began being introduced in vehicles, a feature Cassandra couldn’t live without. My first car still had a tape deck. Having a CD player in my second car was very much an upgrade.
Finally, automakers brought back some classic vehicles such as the Volkswagen Beetle.
Driving Dangerously
1997 Chevrolet Monte Carlo. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
The fact Cassandra obtain her learner’s permit late meant she had many hours of practice ahead to feel confident. Her friend Jen suggested they take her car one evening and drive around.
Technically, what Jen suggests is illegal. I’m only allowed to have a driver who is 21-years-old or older with me while I have my learner’s permit. When we went to the DMV, Maroula kept complaining that Phil won’t be able to take her out when he gets back home in a couple of months since he’ll only be 20. But Jen is right. It’s important for me to have practice before hitting the highway in August.” – Sexual Awakening, Chapter 30
Despite the dangers, the girls and their friends piled into Jen’s car for a joyride.
When we reach Jen’s car, she hands me her keys. “She’s from the ’80s, so no airbags or anything. Don’t fucking kill us.” ‒ Sexual Awakening, Chapter 30
Teenagers often drive older vehicles than their parents, which in the 1990s meant very little, if any, safety equipment.
Wearing a seatbelt became mandatory in Cassandra’s home state of Illinois in 1985. That year, 15.9 percent of residents wore seatbelts. In 2020, the last year of stats, that figure rose to 90.3 percent. Seatbelt usage peaked in 2015 at 95.20 percent.
Cars were manufactured with seatbelts as early as the late 1960s, but less than 15 percent of Americans wore them. Making them mandatory caused an uproar nationwide.
“The battle over safety belt laws in 1980s America reflected widespread criticism of government regulation in a free society,” History says. “The controversy first heated up in 1973, when the NHTSA required all new cars to include an inexpensive technology called a ‘seat belt interlock mechanism’ that prevented a vehicle from starting if the driver wasn’t buckled up.”
Reagan’s Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole proposed abandoning a requirement that automakers to install driver’s side airbags in all new cars if two-thirds of the states passed mandatory seat belt laws by April 1, 1989. They failed to reach two-thirds.
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 made airbags mandatory. However, it would take most of the decade before the safety equipment appeared in dealerships. Airbags would be required for “95 percent of each manufacturer’s annual production of new passenger cars manufactured on and after September 1, 1996, and before September 1, 1997, and for 100 percent of all such production manufactured on and after September 1, 1997; and 80 percent of each manufacturer’s annual production of new MPVs and other light trucks and buses manufactured on and after September 1, 1997, and before September 1, 1998, and for 100 percent of each manufacturer’s production volume manufactured on and after September 1, 1998.”
The law allowed for a temporary exemptions for things like supply issues.
When airbags became mandatory, some of us feared them. We remembered seeing news reports of petite woman whose earrings had been blown from their ears from a deploying airbag, and there also were stories of women who had been decapitated or had their necks broken from airbags.
And, as funny as it sounds in hindsight, I remembering using seatbelts for the first time and my grandmother and I having no idea how to unlatch them. Today, people get in and out of seatbelts and it’s second nature.
According to researchers, seatbelts have saved more than 211,000 lives since 1975 and airbags have saved more than 10,000 lives since the late 1980s.
Here’s the 4-1-1
This blog is a companion piece to Sexual Awakening, available in eBook, paperback and hardcover. This coming-of-age story, set against the backdrop of the mid-1990s Midwest, follows Cassandra, a high schooler whose big dreams clash with her family’s conservative expectations, as she comes into her own while navigating the complexities of teenage sex and dating. Buy now.
To listen to the songs mentioned in Sexual Awakening, follow The Rock Star’s Wife on Spotify.
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