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Starting with a pile of crap car teaches teenagers the joy of DIY: the joy of appreciating how things work so you can fix it yourself.

Something they can carry through life and know how to DIY renovations to their homes: tiling, plumbing, laying sprinkler systems, renovating a kitchen, renovating a bathroom.

It's an important lesson about how everything in life is interesting if you take the time to appreciate it.

Some professors teach a first year philosophy lesson about this: each student is given a small, old building in their community and tasked to write 5,000 words about it.

80% of the class attempt the task, but returns to the professor to complain about how impossible the task is - their building doesn't even have a wikipedia page!!!

The professor offers to give them a different project, which they always accept.
 
The professor tasks them to choose ONE BRICK from the building they were assigned and write 6,000 words about it.

They explore what the bricks were made from, when they were made, how they were made and who mined the materials, how the bricks were colored, who made them, the history of the process, the rituals involved in the process, the ghost stories about those bricks, who likely laid the brick, how moisture effects those bricks, why the bricks are precisely that size, how many bricks like that were made, who first invented the process, what famous buildings are made from exactly the same type of brick, etc.

Students who were incapable of writing about an entire building now submit reports overflowing with information about a single brick.

Those students never look at brick wall the same again.

Those students learn that everything in the world is interesting if you take the time to appreciate it.

That's why teenagers need shitty cars and good fathers.

It truthfully does. I was handed down a lemon 1980 Bronco xlt that I loved but it leaked oil out of the rear main like crazy. My pops and I put a new motor in, among so many other parts, many long nights wrenching on the cold concrete shop floor. It nurtured a life long love of all things mechanical, a hatred of shitskins, fostered a good work ethic, it turned into learning a trade, which turned into getting my attainable dream car. My old man shaped my life through a rusty old Bronco I should have kept because they are expensive now.

True, but this is also a reward for a job already well done.