Driving at Age 14?
© Neydtstock/Dreamstime.com
The words on this Citroën Ami can be translated to, “At age 14, it’s me who drives.”
In France, the minimum age to get a driver’s license is 17, but that hasn’t stopped teens as young as 14 from getting behind the wheel of the Citroën Ami. Although the electric vehicle looks like a car and mostly drives like a car, it isn’t technically a car at all.
Now available in many European countries and parts of the Middle East, the Ami is considered a “quadricycle,” or a four-wheeled microcar. Due to its classification, a full driver’s license isn’t required to drive it—and what is required depends on the country. In France, a driver must have an AM license (a type of motorbike license), which can be obtained after a few hours of lessons.
With a maximum speed of 28 miles per hour (45 kilometers per hour), the Ami is much slower than a real car. It’s also very basic. There’s no heating or air conditioning, no floor mats, and very little storage. While there’s a USB jack, there’s no radio. Still, the Ami has more features than an electric bike or moped, and it keeps its passengers dry when it’s raining.
The Ami won’t take its driver very far. A single battery charge will power the microcar for up to 47 miles (75 kilometers). But the Ami isn’t supposed to be used on a busy road or for long trips. It’s intended for local driving—a trip to the store or a short ride to work.
That’s one reason the Ami has become popular with teens in France, where the law allows people as young as 14 years old to drive it. Many teens in rural parts of the country—places where public transportation is limited—use the microcar to get to and from school. In fact, Citroën Amis became so popular at one French high school that the school built a parking lot for them.
“At first there weren’t many Amis, [and] we just parked outside the school,” a student at the school told Actu.fr. “But then there were more and more, and it became a problem. [The Ami] gives [my brother and me] a lot of freedom, and our parents don’t have to come and pick us up.”
You could say the Ami is somewhere between an electric bike and a car. At 8,000 euros (about 8,600 U.S. dollars), its cost is also somewhere in the middle of those two types of vehicles.
