Gen Z is choosing not to drive

Years ago when my Gen Z nephew was turning 16 (minimum driving age in USA), the conversation went like this:

"Are you excited to start driving and do you want car?"
"Nah, not interested"
"Why not?"
"Where would I go?"
"Wherever you want!"
"Everything I want is right here at home"

I thought about my own Gen X early driving experience with the freedom to go to the mall or the movie theater whenever I wanted and to drive to school or work.

His school (and eventually job) were both within walking bicycling distance.
He had streaming services I never dreamed of when I was his age piping a flood of big budget movies right to his TV whenever he wants
malls are dead

I couldn't really argue with his logic. Years later he did get a car when he moved out and lived farther away from work. However, it was many years after the minimum driving age which was a big departure from generations prior.

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For me the appeal of a car was having somewhere private to do drugs, awkwardly make out with girls, and hide from my parents.

I feel like those things are somewhat timeless?

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- Parents force their kids to share their location, so it isn't like the kids can hide as they used to.
  
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- Even as someone who didn’t try any drugs until I was 20, I fully agree with you. But also gals and bois for me.
  
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My son is about to turn 18 and is of much the same mind. We pushed him a bit to get his license but he rarely drives and has about zero interest in owning his own car. He just doesn't have anywhere he needs/wants to go. I imagine it's a little different for kids with more activities outside the home. Sports, clubs, jobs... He doesn't have any of that going on at this point. I'm admittedly a little sad about that, but I can't really force him to be interested.

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- Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don't have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they're not hanging out online, then they're probably at somebody's house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there's no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don't want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.
  
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The only reason my kids want to learn to drive is to go on road trips to visit their friends across the country. Which sounds awesome and I want to buy a couple beaters so we can do the trip together.

2

Hmm

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"Gen-z is choosing to be homeless."

These crazy kids are forgoing the tradition of having a roof over ones head in favor of urban camping. It definitely has nothing to do the kleptocracy that made housing unaffordable by converting it into a speculative market for Wall Street and foreign nationals to park dirty money.

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I am reading the article to say "even living out of your car is an unobtainable dream for man Gen Z." When combined with the headline I saw recently about the return of company owned housing, the world is looking pretty bleak. We should expect unions to be making a comeback, but many seem to be brainwashed against them.

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Don't forget insurance, either. A new driver will pay sky-high rates for the first few years. And while one can technically have a license but not pay for insurance if they don't own a car, if they ever do get a car insurance may end up even higher, since they dont have a history of good driving under insurance while their peers do.

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I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.

It's just nuts. Used vehicle prices are through the roof in no small part because new vehicles are now ABSURDLY big and expensive.

AAA is now rating the cost of a new car to be something like $0.50-$1 per mile to operate. Or an average of $12k per year. When you carefully do the math, a lot of people are finding that the rideshares aren't much more expensive -- plus now they don't need to deal with the non-monetary costs of car ownership (maintenance, parking, fear of accident/theft, etc). And you can get blackout drunk to try and tune out the chaos of a dying planet and still be able to get home.

Not to mention car accidents are still, last I checked, the main killer of young people.

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- This is why I think owning a self driving car won't be a thing. Uber and such will just have a fleet driving around all day
  
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- I found out one of my 22-y-o coworkers, with no accident history or the like, pays as much quarterly as I do annually for car insurance.
  
  They're also 22. Are they also male? I'm on insurance with my mom (a 50 year old woman) and even then when I hit 25 my insurance dropped like 15%. Insurance has always been expensive as hell for men, women don't get quite as screwed.
  
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My kids insurance for full coverage when they got their license was $35/month.

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In the article they noted this was the same for millennials and gen x before them. I'm going to assume the standard for youths purchasing cars was with the baby boomer generation. I know my dad told me when he was young, you would purchase a cool car that didn't work for the equivalent of $100 dollars, get a friend to tow it home, then work on it for a few weeks to get it running. He told me how much he missed his MG Midget, which let's recognize as a cool ass car for a kid to have. He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars*. All his friends would be doing the same.

Nowadays it would be a $1k junker, and you'd need to have a computer science degree to fix the onboard computer while having all the specific tools to get into their proprietary parts. There are older cars too, but the standard of fixing a car has increased, all the while each generation has less time and money to do it.

This was a typo, but I love this typo. You say deck of cards, I say deck of cars, Thank you @otp@sh.itjust.works !

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_He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars.

Well yeah, having a whole deck of other cars would make it pretty simple!

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Is it really a choice if they fundamentally cannot afford to do so?

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Many can and choose not too. Fuck cars.

10
- Don't disagree with you but north american infrastructure is not set up for public transit
  
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- Huh? Cars are more unattainable than ever, and third spaces are fewer than ever. Gen z has "no" money.
  
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I'm a millennial, but I fucking hate driving and gave it up a while ago. My eyesight is really bad due to misformed corneas so I have trauma from being forced to drive at a younger age. I eventually moved to a major city and got rid of my car the first chance I could (fun fact, leases are scams!). I love being able to walk/take public transit anywhere I want now, but unfortunately leaving the city is incredibly hard.

Fuck cars.

35

Well how the fuck are they supposed to drive when car payment at 500+, gas is 3+ a gallon and car insurance is 1500 per premium! Not to mention potential repairs.

I make 80k a year and I can barely afford my car!

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These articles are so bad. There is no actual research behind them. It's all "it could be this"...well fucking dig into that maybe and get back to us with actual journalism.

Not to mention it's all based on ba consulting firm findings. It's McKinsey so they probably just want to lay people off and are using this research to support that recommendation.

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Millennial chiming in. Donated my car to the humane society a couple years ago. Thankfully I live close enough to walk to work, have plenty of amenities near by, and a bus line a block away when it runs. I've saved so much money about it. If I need a car for a couple of days I rent and it's still less than owning. Do not regret it at all.

Every now and then I think about buying a used car and the prices are absurd on top of all the maintenance, insurance, registration.

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Ah, so it's not just my kids (I'm Gen X). Neither has expressed any interest in driving. One's a starving student, so I guess there's that. But the other's graduated and scored a cushy job where he could certainly afford wheels if he wanted. I asked him about it and he's like nah. I'll just take a lyft or whatever if I need it. And he's a software dev so he spends the time on his laptop. I guess if he were driving, his time would be less productive? I dunno.

We actually went to the same tech convention last fall in Denver and shared a hotel. I knee-jerk rented a car thinking Denver sounds like a driving town. But parking at the convention was exorbitant and we wound up ride-sharing there anyway, so I am beginning to see the merit in his way of thinking? The only time we got any use out of the rental was the last day when we had a little free time before the flight and drove up to Red Rocks. But seriously, for that one trip, the rental was hardly worth it.

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There's been a big boom in interest in urbanism in recent years and increasing awareness of just how the US got so car dependent. Toss in a quick trip to Europe at some point, add in people explicitly saying "the reason you liked these old cities so much was because of transit and lack of cars", and it's an idea that spreads itself.

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- Yeah I hate urban sprawl and how the city planners where I live keep wanting to perpetuate it. I commute most days on an ebike and try to drive less. The only major exception is in my side-gig as a musician in a band. Just too much gear to carry around without 4 wheels.
  
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Cars are expensive and driving really isn't that fun outside rare circumstances that are quickly disappearing. I love cars, and I love a nice drive on a mountain road, but everything else isn't nearly as nice as it used to be when there were fewer people driving, and less dependence on it.

Not to mention, cars are pretty boring these days. The vaguely cool ones are just remakes of old models, and even Ferrari is making SUVs.

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The greatest enemy of good driving conditions is and always will be other drivers. The people who really care about being able to drive should be enthusiastically supporting getting others off the roads because congestion is inevitable.

Especially since it costs less total taxpayer money that way (the classic is Houston vs NYC vs Amsterdam, which spend something like 20%, 10%, and 4% of their municipal budgets on transportation respectively). You're less likely to have congestion AND potholes in a city with trams and bike routes.

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- I love cars, love driving, and I work in self-driving cars because I'm convinced the only people doing it should be the people who see it as a hobby, just like riding horses. You have so many people on the roads who hate it, and drive horribly because they don't care and it's an absolute pain for them. Why should those people drive, other than the fact that we don't have the technology yet to allow them not to?
  
  (Even better, infrastructure to support them not to need cars at all, but that's a different topic. And before we get the "trains are the solution to every problem" crew, I think self driving shuttles are a cool way to diminish vehicles vs cars, that can cover at the same cost more routes than buses, achieve a higher occupancy rate, and would need next to no infrastructure changes.)
  
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The best time to drive a car was during the pandemic.

I had never seen so few cars on the road. The world felt positively idyllic.

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- That's part of why I only go grocery shopping at like 8pm.
  
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- Also saw significant increases in road fatalities.
  
  Because it turns out the main thing keeping many of our roads safe was... congestion. When operated at true designed speeds, the roads kill people.
  
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Gen z earns like $15/hr.

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Driving is so dangerous that I can't even believe that it's this easy to get a license from the first place.

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I can't drive because I'm visually impaired. I know I'm too visually impaired to drive because I can't even grocery shop properly with my shit eyesight - with a basket, let alone pushing a trolley!

But I pass the eye exams they make you take before you get a license and ive double checked with my optometrist and yes, my vision score is within the legal limits to drive as long as I wear my glasses... It's baffling, because I absolutely should not be driving! I can't see shit!

So I don't drive.

When I say "I'm too blind to drive" some people ask if I can just lie about my vision and fake my way through, because "you really need a licence" and when I explain I can legally get a licence I just don't, for everyone's safety, they act like I'm being a selfish child for not doing the adult thing and getting my licence. Just because it can doesn't mean I should.

I do cycle, pedalling a 20kg frame of metal at 15km/h on a bike path feels a lot safer than driving a 1 tonne hunk of metal at 80km/h on a highway. Without my bike I'd be pretty fucked in terms of my independence and being able to do what needs to be done as an adult. Fortunately my vision isn't degenerative.

But in the last 5 years, especially since 2020 covid locksdowns, I feel like there are more people on the road that shouldn't be. There's just a huge increase in the frequency of "silly mistakes" - people swerving into the bike lane without looking to avoid a speed bump, people running a red turn signal because they're looking at the green straight signal, people merging lanes at dangerously low speeds, no one putting their headlights on in the rain, everyone forgetting to indicate, people stopping more abruptly instead of slowing and anticipating a stop sign, and my personal favourite, everyone cutting corners in residential areas like they're a formula 1 driver, just turning into the oncoming traffic of the street they're turning into.

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Obligatory fuck McKinsey.

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The signal of a less enthused Gen Z when it comes to driving could affect the car industry. But McKinsey analysts point out that previous generations of Americans had also appeared less interested in driving but went behind the wheel of cars eventually.

It's like a threat

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It’s like a threat

Welcome to America. This is how it's done.

Nobody is really interested in the way things work here, it's literally about forcing you to accept that you have to live this way to even begin to survive. It's about making people make choices they wouldn't otherwise make, based on a system of requirements that is always changing.

It was the same way with homeownership until it wasn't. Americans turned more conservative as they aged and got more "skin in the game" in the markets. They started seeing their homes valuation as something important, and so businesses and stocks doing well was also suddenly important. It's interesting (not) that their children who are not able to be similarly invested because they can't even begin to afford a house are not growing up conservative.

Cars will be forced on the populace, the people that run this country have no imagination and refuse to budge because they're making too much stinking money with how it works right now and they're going to drive this sucker into the ground, drain every last penny out of the economy, and then the rich will fuck off to Europe or Australia or Honduras or somewhere they can ignore how they hollowed out one of the largest nations, which is quite an achievement.

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- "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
  
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Those scooters are pretty cool though. If you told 10 year old me there would be electric scooters just sitting around on the street in the future you could just scan and ride, I'd have called you a big fibber.

Sometimes my dog gets a surprise run, while I just get to ride a scooter.

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Keeping people that don't like to drive off the roads is only a good thing.

I don't see a problem here.

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They can't afford it with insurance and other expenses.

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Gen Z can't afford £3k a year on insurance.

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Millennials can't afford 3k a year on insurance.

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good

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I'm a fan of public transportation too, but if you live in America, and not in a city, no car equals no job equals no income. Good for some things, not good for economy and living expenses.

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- The important element that needs to be, and now is, talked about more is that this state of affairs is not normal or natural. It was very deliberately created by car manufacturers in order to make life without a car be essentially impossible.
  
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- no car equals no job equals no income
  
  That's one of the things my kids noticed when searching for work.
  
  A lot of the jobs specified either that you need a licence because you will need to drive a company vehicle sometimes, or that the workplace is not transit accessible and you will need your own transportation to/from work.
  
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From the UK, now in Europe.

There has been basically one time in my life that actually necessitated driving. Almost everything else can be covered by public transport or bikes/e-scooters/walking

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Public transport is so unreliable and expensive in the UK that many have no option but to drive for their commute to work. I believe if the government subsidised public transport many more would convert to your way of thinking.

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- Public transport is so unreliable and expensive in the UK
  
  Yet, from a north American perspective the UK's public transit system is aspirationally good.
  
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- Can confirm, if the trains ran early enough for me to take one to work then I definitely wouldn't have a car right now.
  
  Kind of insane how badly our rail network (and postal service) has degraded, apparently it used to be really good, like five times faster than it currently is. Alas... Fucking Tories got their hands on them.
  
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- Ah yeah, I almost forgot how competent the fucking Tories are.
  
  It's not like the UK can't have these necessities, the government just makes it impossibly difficult time and time again.
  
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My old jeep blew its head gasket back in November 2022 and I have been walking and riding my ebike since then. Now my cheap Chinesium bike is out of order so just walking everywhere until I get new parts.

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I'm an older millennial and have never even bothered to get a driver's license.

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Have a license, don't drive. But for me it's mostly trauma from all the times I've almost been in a crash with various drivers, myself included.
Cars are fucking dangerous and not enough drivers understand that.

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You mean those services that offer to do the driving for people have impacted the way they live?

Wow, I had no idea business could alter how people spend their money. Someone should write a book on this or something. Truly revolutionary.

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!fuckcars@lemmy.world

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younger millennial. never got my licence, or really wanted it.

people are shocked when i tell them i don't drive. it was annoying growing up cus people kept trying to push it on me but eventually most people gave up. older people get weirdly offended if you don't drive, i truly don't understand it. honestly just find cars massively unappealing, nausea inducing, and gross for everyone and everything involved. like a loud moving pollution boxes that can kill. roads are pretty gross too, covered in oil and garbage. i was recently diagnosed autistic, i think it partially explains my distaste for them with sensory issues, at least the nausea part.

and in modern world it's not even really an inconvenience. if I need to get somewhere there is uber, if there was better public transport options where i live i would take them instead, trains and rail tend to cause me much less nausea. but i still have to use uber a lot even tho they make me car sick. pretty sure its way cheaper than actually owning a car, at least with how often i use it. get groceries delivered ect..

i would be pretty happy if the car industry collapsed ngl

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Gen Z is definitely driving, they're all over the place.

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Born into the cheapest air fares ever.

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Genz can't afford a car. Even used cars cost too damn much

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Same shit as when Millennials were killing home ownership.

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