I think it depends on the kid. When a family we knew gifted their 16 year old with a Porsche many were appalled. But as his mother told mine, over the summer when he worked in the family business selling expensive outdoor furniture and landscaping, he worked 15 hour days and outsold every salesman by more than 50%. “Our top salesman gets the car of his choice. Same for him”.
@maya54, I agree that the general principles we are asserting should be situation/person-dependent. There are no doubt 16 year-olds who are so mature that getting a Porsche or a big inheritance doesn’t distort their choices. But, in most cases I can think of, I’d prefer to wait until a bit later.
Yes, it was considered a ‘prize’ and taxed as regular income.
Personally, I don’t think a 16 year old needs a Porsche. That said, it does depend on the kid. There is a difference between the kid who drives recklessly and speeds and then crashes the Porsche and the parents just buy them a new one with no consequences and the kid who drives the Porsche recklessly, but then gets the car taken away and looses their driving privileges.
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Never in my book, both of my kids drove beat up cars at that age, one had almost 200k miles, and the other had maybe 300k miles, going by memory. When I donated them, they had $750 and $500 value respectively. They are not materialistic, at least I didn’t raise them that way.
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What? I don’t think anything you describe depends on the kid. The two kids are the same: they drive a Porsche recklessly and speed and crash it. The difference is the parents. And probably not SUCH a big difference in parents, given that both sets gave the kid a freaking Porsche 
to begin with, but still the difference is that one set of parents just buy a new replacement Porsche and the other set takes the car away. But the kids are the same. This is just a pretty gross example. No teenagers should be driving Porsches, really for any reasons, regardless of number of hours worked or sales made, or anything. It’s pretty vomit-inducing, really.
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Sorry, didn’t mean to offend.
Well, considering very few teenagers drive Porsches, it’s really not that huge an issue and certainly not vomit inducing…
. Ha ha, sorry, I may have overreacted! (Although, I admit that parents buying teenagers Porsches actually IS at the very least gag-inducing to me . )
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Can you imagine the insurance rates on a 18 year old male driving a Porsche?
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Not just the insurance rate, in our local news, it’s often fatal death with a young adult driving Porsche, not pretty.
I will say that the Porsche driving kid is now the middle aged head of the company which he has savvily grown and expanded to 10x the revenue. I don’t know how “mature” he was at 16. But he was…excuse the pun…driven. He worked like crazy every day. He has 3 great kids and his wife ( a former model… of course ) is genuinely the nicest person I’ve ever met.
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A few years ago my college-aged kids went skiing (on their own dime) for 3 days and we surprised them by buying their lift tickets one day (100+ bucks for a one-day lift ticket was a lot to them!)
I was happy to do it - I think mostly because they did not expect it, did not feel entitled to it, did not ask for it.
No Porches in their future - at least not from us! 
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We are going on a vacation tomorrow. One of our kids and spouse are joining us for three days. We are so happy to have them. This is our treat.
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When our S told us he was engaged to fiancée he had been dating for many years, we gave him a significant sum of money to be used toward wedding or whatever he wanted. We didn’t give his single sister an equal sum but we have been supporting her because her medical disability prevents her from working. S wasn’t cashing the checks we sent him when we sent her support checks. Fair doesn’t mean equal to my kids.
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Along those similar lines. We had a trip scheduled/booked for Universal for D19 HS grad and D23 8th grade grad. Seemed like a good time to take a big trip. My Mom about a month before the trip surprised us with some $$$ for the trip. My wife got the idea of seeing how much it would be to make one of those days a VIP experience days. We did it. Let me tell you it was the best idea ever. We had a great day walking onto every ride with no lines. Seeing behind the scenes. It also made the rest of the trip relaxing because we had already done all the time consuming rides so we didn’t get up early and took our time the other days.
My girls still talk about that trip to this day.
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