For anyone who doesn't know a thing about cars, purchasing one can be quite a challenge. For teenagers especially, buying a car is part of a long-winded process that hopefully ends in the reduction of naiveté and a bit of self-realization. For those who buy cars later in their lives, or are teenagers with an adult-like mental age, these stages usually occur in reverse. But for a lot of people, this is what buying a car can feel like.

1. The High Expectations Stage / The Specifications Stage

“I need a black (not gray, not silver) car that’s actually from this decade (2009 is not okay,) with less than 60,000 miles (I’m not taking anything with a mile over that) and a system that can pair with my phone via Bluetooth.”

If you have thoughts that sound like the sentence above, you’ve probably just started looking for a car. You might be excited at the possibility of freedom from your mom’s “value car”/minivan, but you won’t settle for anything less than your dream vehicle. You clearly don’t ask for much – a specific color (how do people get “champagne” and “golden” mixed up?) a unique brand (“Mitsubishi” just sounds cooler than “Honda” and you probably see at least 28 Hondas in every parking lot you go to) and a top notch sound system (so you can really feel that beat drop) – all at a reasonable price point. Once you decide that no set of criteria is more reliable than the one you have chosen, you begin your search. You scour Craigslist and Autotrader and any website you can find, send a plethora of links to your parents, and are pleasantly surprised at the quantity of “viable” options you have.

2. The Knowledge Master Stage / The Car Genius Stage

After your parents tell you off for having such ridiculous expectations, you decide to do some research. It turns out that in order to partake in those spontaneous trips to Walmart, Tijuana, or wherever you need to go, you need high fuel efficiency, low mileage and a safe car. This changes the whole game! You decide to start from scratch, and in no time, you are a car expert. You know which brands are reliable and which models have the best crash ratings, what fuel efficiency means, and which mileages are decent for a car depending on the country it's from. With your newfound knowledge, you can really begin to search for a car with an appropriate set of criteria. Maybe you will find your champagne-colored Mitsubishi with Bluetooth along the way, but for now those specifications have taken a back seat to the important features of reliability and affordability (…is what you say to your parents.) But you still think you know everything about cars after a day’s worth of research, so you assemble a new list.

3. The “Give Me A Car” Stage / The Desperation Stage

Upon your embarkment on the “I will be reasonable” boat, your urgency for a car begins to increase. You’ve been researching cars for much too long, and all the good cars seem to be sold as soon as you get a chance to call the dealership/owner. Some kind of deadline is approaching, and instances of your parent/friend not being able to drive you to the place you want to go seem to be increasing. Your random Taco Bell cravings are suddenly happening at untimely hours of the night, and one day you urgently need coconut sugar and Post-it notes from Publix and have to wait a whole 24 hours for your dad to pick it up. “No more!” you tell yourself. You start sending out a dozen emails per day and begin test driving cars left and right.

4. The Victory Stage / The Grateful Stage

After test driving some cars, you begin to gain a little perspective. You’ve braved a sea of dishonest scammers (fake pictures, omitted defects, questionable Carfaxes) and strange cars (bumpy rides, curious smells, peeling stickers) to find one that isn’t half bad. But along with your victory, you gain a new outlook. You realize how privileged you are to even think about owning a car as a teenager, to have supportive parents who have been through the process, to have the comforting hand of the Internet guiding you towards the right information and choices. You see the car for what it is: a luxury, not a rite of passage. Perhaps you never got your champagne colored Mitsubishi with world-class audio, but you know that you have your whole life to make those kinds of bad decisions.