There is always going to be a generation gap. The term “generation gap” was coined in the 60s when it became evident that Baby Boomers had developed a whole new set of rules for themselves that put a significant chasm between them and their parents in terms of interests and values. Generation gaps will always define new generations and every generation will march to the beat of their own drum. For me, the gap got Grand Canyon wide when I read the LA Times piece by Martin Zimmerman that cited a J D Power study which indicated that Generation Y has less interest in cars. As a lifelong car guy who built an entire social world around cars I would have to ask; “Generation why?”
J D Power monitored Internet traffic conversations on Autoblog, Twitter and Facebook for several months earlier this year and came to the conclusion that teens and early 20-something “careerists” had less interest in our four-wheeled friends than previous generations. I understand the social websites but why would anybody get on a car website to talk about something in which they apparently have no interest?
The malady has even gotten a new name based upon the drop in car ownership in Japan. Social scientists in desperate need of a new buzzword fix call it “demotorization”. So young “careerists” have decided to “demotorize”. I have “demotorized” in the past under a different plan. My plan was to drive the hell out of a badly neglected car until a piston tried to bust its way out of its cylinder jail. Most of that decision to “demotorize” was in the hands of my car. Gen Y has changed the definition to include a conscious and apparently rational decision not to own a car.
I should be happy that a new generation has decided not to become the newest members of the gridlock gang, but mostly I am puzzled by the news. The study indicated that Gen Y was a comfortable member of a new cyber society that “perceive less of a need to physically congregate, and less of a need for a mode of transportation”. Personally the need to physically congregate was one of the driving forces behind my first car.
What has changed the game for Gen Y? I realize that the Internet has a very generous supply of porn and that would definitely have kept me hunkered down in my parents’ basement for a sizeable chunk of my high school years. But eventually I would have ventured into a real flesh and blood world filled with real women and real possibilities. None of that would have happened in my parents’ house stranded without any wheels.
There were always a couple of great reasons to own a car from day one for any guy ever since the first horseless carriage- to see the world and meet women in no particular order. The spirit of adventure has always been the major reason for a set of car keys until marriage, parenthood and soccer suck the fun out of cars and replace fun with practicality. Then that beautiful symbiotic threesome relationship between cars, freedom and youth gets vaporized by parental responsibility and minivan ownership.
A car is the first real taste of independence in a kid’s life. Take away a car and the emotional umbilical cord survives longer than it should and the danger of a forty seven year old basement dweller living with his aging parents becomes a real possibility. This is the ugly reality of a generation with no plan to cross an important threshold which includes interaction with the real world.
Don’t get me wrong, the Internet highway is a great place to spend some time. So is a real highway, especially if it gets some kid behind a real steering wheel on a real road to physically congregate with eligible young females in the real world. That should not be the road less traveled when you’re 19 years old with a raging case of hormones and no amount of free porn will change that reality even if you can type real fast with one hand.
Sure a kid can google earth and visit nearly every square inch of the planet through his Apple or I-pod but that is hardly a multi-dimensional experience filled with any tactile sensation beyond the touch of a keypad.
I still believe Dinah Shore when she suggested that we see the USA in our Chevrolet even if a lot of people choose other car brands in 2009. The important thing is that cars are part of a real world experience and the call of the road is also still the call of the wild, complete with flat tires and other road side adventures.
Most of us need a car for very practical reasons in our lives. When we were younger we needed a car for less practical reasons but for a no less important reason: We needed to take a ride into life’s experiences and a steering wheel got us there quicker than a keyboard. We still need that kind of lesson.
[Read more Jim Sutherland at mystarcollector.com]
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You need to take into account the increasing importance of academic achievement in being able to lead a middle-class life.
We all knew people who worked practically full time after school to pay for gas, insurance and repairs on some beater. In many cases all this work took a toll on their academic performance. Thirty years ago there were more lucrative career options for those who didn’t do well in high school and decided not to go to college. These days, if you don’t go on to college, the chance of you being able to live a middle class life are greatly reduced.
Today, many savvy parents and their children are making the rational choice to forgo a car and after school job and instead focus on academics and resume building sports and other extracurricular activities.
Perhaps another data point for the theory that men are becoming feminized.
Once I got my car after getting my license when I graduated high school, I definitely felt more free. First tank of gas put in the car was used driving down PCH from Long Beach to Dana Point. It was great, getting the hell away from my parents and hanging out with my friends in a gazebo miles and miles away from home, overlooking the ocean and feeling the ocean breeze. Then just cruising (really fast) up and down hills that overlook the ocean, winding through quiet neighborhoods with music SUPER loud! It definitely made my friendships stronger!
That’s way better than being at home alone, taking 034903 profile pictures of yourself, photoshopping them just to post it on Myspace/Facebook to get comments and “socialize.” And totally better than twitters spending hours in front of a monitor trying to get more followers/subscribers.
I’m very lucky to have parents to pay for my car/gas/insurance and to live in California where there’s so much fun stuff just a short car drive away. I think many kids these days live in urban areas where they take public transportation, or dorm so they don’t need a car.
Besides, with all the hip kids blowing all their money away on Apple iPhones and MacBooks… they probably don’t have any money left for a car anyways!
Maybe “less interest” does not translate to living without a car but with not caring about what kind of car they are living with as long as it gets them from A to B. Maybe generation Y doesn’t apply the same social status to the ownership of a fast car that my generation did. Good for them – the enjoyment of cars is, after all, optional.
I blame both parents out of the house at work in the late afternoon plus the hook-up culture replacing dating. Young guys used to think they need to have a car to have a chance at sex. Had to impress a girl enough to get several sequential dates plus a car provided a private place to fool around.
Another factor may be traffic congestion taking away much of the fun of driving. Harder to have an attraction to the open road when your daily reality is roads filled with other cars.
Or maybe its that most cars within the reach of a teenager or 20 something are boring appliances and there’s really nothing to fall in love with. I’d agree with the other poster that hooking up is so easy you really don’t need a car to do so. Many kids have had sex before they’re old enough to apply for a permit.
“As there are no precise dates for when Generation Y starts and ends, most commentators use birth dates ranging somewhere from 1976 to late 1990s”
-Wikipedia
A few opinions / perspectives
-People that play World of Warcraft 24/7 generally do not care about cars or the real world at all.
-Generation Y is a latch key generation that was trained by their paranoid overprotective aging Baby Boomer parents to play video games and watch movies in the house alone instead of interacting with the “scary world outside”
-The few times I drove downtown while sober I noticed Cops lurking like ferocious predators around every bar literally pulling people out of their cars once they had a few drinks. One particular time I think at night during “Hoopfest” it was like a DUI assembly line. Makes a person VARY WARY of trying to pick up chicks at bars.
-In a hideously overcrowded city where the cars sit in stand still traffic jams it can be hard to feel the passion and spirit of driving.
-Gen X and the Baby Boomers got the PHAT jobs. And cars cost money.
-Perhaps Gen Y is much, MUCH more wary of the family thing. So less inspired to try and flaunt a car to get a woman. Having a baby around the house would really interfere with those World of Warcraft marathon sessions.
I’ll tell you at least one of the main reasons.
Colleges and universities have strongly discouraged having cars on campus. Freshmen are often not even allowed to have one period. Upper classmen have to pay several hundreds of dollars just to have the right to park them in a space.
You also have the issue of schools offering far better transportation services to college students. Most offer shuttles all over the place and cars aren’t even allowed to be on certain sections of the campus. Both my alma maters have large areas covering several square miles of the main campus where cars are verboten.
Students can also conveniently take a shuttle, get drunk, and take the easy ride home courtesy of the school at 2:00 AM. I’ve also found that most colleges (not all) are taking a more laissez-faire attitude towards campus drinking and focusing more on the heavy drugs. Back in the 1990’s several schools had ‘Student Life’ departments that were effectively run by puritanical Nazis. Today’s versions are staffed by those who have BTDT and the alcohol policies are far more realistic.
Finally, I would say that most products and services can now be found on campus. You have a choice in foods and often times it isn’t overpriced crap. Supermarkets are either nearby or shuttles send the students there.
It’s mostly a university driven phenomena.
I’ve been unusually lucky in that over the last 45 years or so, I’ve owned something over 250 cars in several different countries. The ones that left the greatest impression were the old sports racing and grand touring cars of the 1950’s and sixties which could (more or less legally) be driven on the road as well as later used in historic and classic races. Of course they broke down, usually not very seriously, but there was real passion behind their creation and a challenge to their use that made every drive a stimulating, joyous event. Today, I use an Audi as my everyday car. It’s competent, well made and not very different from its competitors, none of which I’d mind driving in its stead. I understand why my children don’t care particularly about cars or within reason what they drive, since with the vigorous enforcement of traffic laws, justifiably or not, by revenue desperate cities and states, the whole process isn’t much fun anymore. I hate to think that the golden age of motoring has ended but just as I don’t think about our fridge or clothes washer, I fear that the day will soon dawn when we feel like that about our cars too.
I wish I was not so obsessed with cars. I’m glad I found so many profound things through cars, but sometimes I feel emotionally outer-dependent on cars. Which is not so fun.
The moment you started comparing gen y to yourself the article became about how gen y should have the same priorities as you. You call cars a kids first freedom but that’s the car guy in you. The world is small now, and its only getting smaller. Cars are an expensive habit, they could spend that money traveling the world and meeting the opposite sex that way(since you used the hormone example). They’d see a whole lot more of the world than that car is going to take them to.
I still believe Dinah Shore when she suggested …
How old are you? :)
When I was a kid, having a car was a sufficiently big deal that “going for a drive” was a form of recreation. Although it still is for (mainly) some young men, I think it’s rare now for families to use their car unless there is a destination with some other activity. The roads are so clogged that driving for most families is mostly a hassle, and all but a stubborn minority are aware of the downsides to car usage.
So there’s a generation for whom a car is like a utility, not proxy for their person, not a end unto itself, and not a form of recreation. I know a teenager who’s an apprentice car mechanic, yet has zero interest in owning a car himself. Indeed, he’s fixated on classic/vintage 10-speed bicycles. But I also know another whose parents gave him a BMW convertible before he was old enough to drive it.
I can see why motorheads would be perplexed, even frightened by this change. An entire belief system dumped, just like that. One can be a car enthusiast in terms of enjoying cars as useful tools, without seeing any need whatsoever for expensive cars that have the useless capbility of going 200 mph, or accelerating like a rocket, or having cooled cupholders. Anyone who equates car ownership with freedom is not considering a lot of important factors, and is dismissing the lifestyles of most of the planet’s residents for most of history.
There was a time that bicycles, for instance, were credited with allowing western females to escape male confinement. Now, women are just as able to buy cars as men, and are perhaps more aware of the downsides of car ownership, so as Shania Twain said: “So you’ve got a car. It don’t impress me much.”
This is the best TTAC discussion I’ve seen in quite awhile. Kudos, Jim, for raising the issue.
The answers have some real substance to them, but there certainly isn’t any one thing.
In a way, Jim answers his own question. You say eventually you would have “ventured into a real flesh and blood world filled with real women and real possibilities. None of that would have happened in my parents’ house stranded without any wheels.”
For some of today’s kids, that’s precisely the point. They don’t want to leave!
ConejoKing may nail part of it when he says, “Generation Y is a latch key generation that was trained by their paranoid overprotective aging Baby Boomer parents to play video games and watch movies in the house alone instead of interacting with the “scary world outside.”
They’re scared of the outside world. It’s a dangerous place compared to online, or a teenage extension of organized playdates — aka “hooking up.”
Ronnie Schreiber says we should consider that men have become feminized. I’d agree with aspects of that. Celebrity male role models today aren’t Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. I’m sure that either Justin Timberlake or Shia LeBeuf is capable of knocking a girl up, and probably have. But none of the young bucks strike me as the sort of guy who could handle a 1,000-hp Bugatti Veyron on a track, much less a Miata. The closest we have to a calm, assured and mature masculine presence is President Obama. As much as I admire him, I don’t see him doing any smoky burnouts in the next 3-8 years.
Also, don’t discount the collective impact of global warming, green marketing, “An Inconvenient Truth, and other aspects of the environmental movement on young people.
Finally, though, car enthusiasm is not dead. Look at the box office for the last “Fast and the Furious” movie. Those gearheads were in their twenties, nor their fifties.
Jmo’s point about education and focus makes sense. Cars just have to be your inclination. If they’re not, forget about it. Technology and the Internet may be cooler right now.
We also may be in a transition period. 20 years from now the modern ‘57 Chevy, ‘65 Mustang or ‘97 Acura Integra may take the form of a used 2018 Tesla “hot hatch” powered by a hybrid hydrogen/electric power train. Cars may just have to settle for a smaller piece of the pie, that’s all.
brandloyalty,
Excellent point. California and Florida were the only places I’ve met women who were really impressed by what a guy drove. And none of them did it for me.
The Beach Boys may have sung about getting laid because of their cars, but they were the Beach Boys. Most of the time that I see a guy in a ‘Vette, Porsche or M-series BMW, he’s alone. There’s a reason for that too.
It’s possible that environmentalism has something to do with it as well, though I agree that it’s mostly an economic thing.
I’m afraid it is just possible that America’s love affair with the automobile has ended. As a consumer product, the automobile has matured so much over the past century and the freedom that it enables us to enjoy is taken so for granted that we do not appreciate it any more. For most Americans, it no longer is regarded as a technological marvel, but rather as an appliance, no more exciting than a refrigerator.
The public no longer waits breathlessly for a glimpse of the latest, flashy new models. “Planned obsolescence”, Detroit’s business model for many years, is a thing of the past. For the most part, automobiles do not stir passions as they once did. Consider that most of the best selling passenger cars are prosaic, soulless sedans such as the Toyota Camry and that the two top selling vehicles are pickup trucks.
But just as I begin to sink into despair over our culture’s loss of automotive passion, some 20 year old blasts by me in a Mustang GT or customized ricer and I realize there may hope for us gear heads after all.
@Ronnie Schreiber:
Perhaps another data point for the theory that men are becoming feminized.
Eh? How’s that?
@DearS:
I wish I was not so obsessed with cars. I’m glad I found so many profound things through cars, but sometimes I feel emotionally outer-dependent on cars. Which is not so fun.
Yeah, to say nothing of the moneypit aspect. I often wish I didn’t give a damn and could happily drive a Corolla or whatever Consumer Reports told me to buy every six or eight years. Instead I have five (more or less) mobile moneypits. Blort.
Driving is expensive and it’s hazardous to your health. I fantasize about living within walking distance of my job. I think among younger people it doesn’t make you cool anymore to have a car, although I couldn’t tell you why. I’m 24 but I’m not hooked into the culture. The only people who will have cars are the ones that actually need them, which is probably how it should be. The less people on the road to collide with the better, I say.
I think it is a mix of a lot of the reasons previously posted. By the time I got my license in the mid 90s the whole ‘makeout point’ idea of hooking up in the back seat after a date was pretty much dead – the two times I tried my date and I’s interlude was cut short by a knock on the window from a policeman (thankfully both times the officer was kind enough to just tell us to go home and leave it at that, these days, who knows what would happen).
Gas was still under a dollar then, and while the internet was beginning to become mainstream, ’social networking’ was still a long ways off. For my friends and I cars were definitely a necessary means towards the end of freedom. I remember nights when we would all pile into my friend’s black on black ‘89 Maxima, pump some appropriate hard rock or metal on the sound system, and just pick a direction to drive – north, south, east or west, until we found something interesting to occupy our time. Our discoveries, such as the porn store in rural Maryland which inexplicably always had postal service trucks parked in front of it, or what we all still think was a dead guy laying in the middle of I-295 near Wilmington, or strip club in Baltimore, a couple blocks from the police station, that didn’t card us at the door, are all great memories that served to make for great friendships. The late night flat tires or breakdowns due to failing alternators and coolant leaks taught us a good bit of self reliance and damage control, and we learned a bit about how electrical and mechanical things work through adding performance upgrades like cold air intakes, or through epic kludges such as wiring a household lightswitch to control the horn in a mid 80s Tercel so that it could pass state inspection (apparently it didn’t matter how the horn was activated, as long as it could be done on request).
Once we were older and some of us went to college and others into the workforce the cars were still needed, both to get us to our jobs, whether they were full time or weekend, and to visit those that had gone to school out of state or across the border in Canada. We learned how to read roadmaps, a skill that is increasingly lost due to cheap nav systems, and learned a lot about various cars due to seeing cool stuff on the road and then trying to find pictures of it on the internet later to find out what it was (the ‘Japanese Ferrari’ (later discovered to be an Acura NSX) that we saw on a road trip to NYC had us stumped for quite a while).
I can’t imagine not wanting to have a license or a car, but then again I don’t get the Jonas Brothers or Myley Cyrus either. My own little sister, who is only six years younger than myself, still doesn’t have a car or license at the age of 22, even though she lives on her own away from home and works, through some combination of bumming rides and public transportation. Personally, I like to be able to go anywhere anytime and not have to rely on bus schedules or favors to do so, but I guess the tide is changing.
Let’s not overthink this.
Most of us on this site came of (driving) age at a time when insurance was cheap, traffic was light, and public transit availability was at an all-time low — or were children of parents who did. There were also some beastly, beautiful cars out there, and the sounds and smells still resonate.
As one of those children, I bought into the obsession with cars equaling freedom, and in many ways it did; but in acting on that obsession, I found myself working jobs that required a car, spending all my wages on keeping that car alive and insured, and wondering what the point of it was.
So the children of people like me, they’re not as obsessed with cars? Who can blame them? They grew up watching us slowly lose our passion as high insurance rates, choked motorways and bland “products” became the norm. We moved to more livable cities (ie cities with public transit and/or walking distance to our daily affairs) and found ways to minimize our time spent in traffic.
Then add on the internet and cable television, and suddenly social isolation is a thing of the past, which is one of the real drivers of “freedom” that kids used to want; they wanted to be free to socialize. So that’s another pressure gone. Oh, and what of games like Forza and Gran Turismo? Real driving is expensive and boring compared to those.
At the end of the day, though, I still firmly believe that if cars were compelling and reasonably priced, insurance inexpensive and roads relatively empty, there would be just as much car lust as there used to be. I’m also sure there’s still plenty of it out there, even with everything I’ve just talked about; “less” interest doesn’t mean “no” interest.
I call B.S. Maybe there is less overall interest but just look at SEMA. Are you going to try to tell me that stuff is aimed at 30 somethings? Or visit any enthusiast forum. You will see teenagers writing passionately about complex auto engineering theory. They are dead wrong in almost every case, but you can not dispute that they are passionate. I see young people eschewing women and freedom, just to be able to put that $10 turbo system on their E36 M3. Fear not, auto enthusiasm is alive and well in the younger generations.
I think it’s more simple, at least from observation in Australia.
Generation Y seem to spend every dollar they have, and often have massive credit card or phone debts to go with. They’re not in a position to purchase a car outright or qualify (certainly recently) for an auto loan.
They also seem to aim a LOT higher than I ever did. They’re not prepared to drive around in a beater as a first car. They have to have THE BEST immediately otherwise don’t bother.
On the plus side, they seem happy to take public transport or walk or bike-it (or bum a ride with a car-owning friend).
This article depresses me. Here is another huge piece of my young adulthood which apparently is of no value to the current generation. Yes the car was a symbol of freedom, freedom from our middle class mores, our parents. that how we got out and about in the world.
And yes I realize that I am responding on line but given the choice of foregoing the internet or the car I’ll stick with the car. In comparison the internet is just a little bit of entertainment because there’s nothing worth watching on TV.
And the writer is correct the whole point was that the car gave you the opportunity to get laid. Remember Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”. That summed it up pretty neatly.
So education is getting in the way. We all thought education was a chance to make more money so we could spend it on cars and getting laid. And a good stereo system.
Cars are appliances, “rock stars” actually dance to the music someone else wrote for them and some other hired guy is playing for them. It’s a boring world.
And I’m still p.o.ed at Iran for the oil crisis in 79-80!
It’s always depressing when people don’t share our point of view. I don’t take it personally. The world is changing and longing for the old days is a sign of creeping old age of the worst sort. I do love cars, but it’s getting harder and harder every day. I only use my car on weekends and, for me, that makes it work. If I had to commute, I think I’d grow to hate the notion of driving anywhere.
How often is actual driving like what we see on TV commercials? If I were 20-something, I’m not sure that I’d want anything to do with the whole car thing. As with so many other things, it over-promises and under-delivers.
Gen-Y are, on the whole, still relatively young. If you don’t have a lot of money and you don’t need a car, then few people buy one. This was true of my generation (”gen-X”) and the one before me, with the obvious exception of those few individuals who truly embraced / identified with the automobile.
Rest assured, once Gen-Y gets to the point where they need to commute to work, they will acquire an interest in cars. Obvious exceptions for cities with good mass transit (e.g. NYC) where no one in their right mind owns a car.
//dan.
I was born on the X/Y cusp in 1981. I probably had a more car-oriented childhood than many here on TTAC. Was born in Detroit and had at least 30 family members who were either directly or indirectly involved with the Big 3 in some capacity or another. Their duties ranged from racing to engineering to being management losers. I was on the front line of the action…cruised Gratiot and Woodward, entered my car into shows. However, now that I am in DC, I have absolutely no need for a car.
As a matter of fact, I’d venture to guess that the passion for cars in the X/Y generation is about a quarter of what the Baby Boomers had. In the 50s cars meant freedom and style. Today, they are an appliance that is for travelling from A to B.
I still enjoy life behind the wheel even if I tend to seek out less people and more untravelled roads these days.That is when cars become a form of relaxation therapy for me. It is a vastly different direction from my youthful journeys in search of crowds,but they both involve time behind the wheel in the sincere pursuit of adventure. These days the open road is the adventure.
I don’t go much for generational profiling, but I’ll play along. Let’s pretend that GenY really doesn’t care as much about cars.
No mystery to me why they should think of cars as anything but appliances. The mystery is why did so many of us boomers care (and still care) about cars?
By the 30s, most American families had cars. Cars were not new and novel to our parents, much less to us. We grew up in cars.
Sure, we needed them for transport, but was there any real doubt about getting one? During the post war period, up to about the first oil crisis, real purchasing power was generally rising. Many families went from one car to two. We couldn’t avoid getting a car if we tried.
We should have been the first generation to be blase about cars. They’d already become the standard ubiquitous transport mode. They should have thrilled us about as much as electric refrigerators or talking movies.
It’s not as if most cars had been in any way interesting. I know, someones going to say GTO, or 442, or Pony Car, blah, blah, blah. Most of the cars we saw in our neighborhoods were Biscayne wagons or Fairlane sedans, or something equally “interesting”.
To get interested in cars because of a few hot models is a lot like developing an intense interest in kitchen appliances because you saw a sub-zero.
It’s one hell of a testament to marketing men of the era that they got us interested in what had already been long established as a pedestrian (pun intended) mode of transport.
@PeteMoran:
I think you’ve hit on something important here. Disposable income is perhaps more limited than ever for those in the 18-25 crowd, and teenage “social networking” 20 years ago was your own wired phone line and a driver’s license.
If today your only portal extant to the freedom of the open road was an eight year-old used Saturn shod with Wal-Mart tires, you’d be taking the train home to play Gran Turismo 5, too.
I’ve got a quick summary for you as to how I think the data falls. Bimodal, actually.
low end: can’t afford cars/don’t enjoy driving
high end: live in an urbanized area/driving in traffic sucks and-or can’t afford to garage it/insure it/don’t need to drive it
You’ve got the richer/more educated Gen-Y that doesn’t like driving and/or doesn’t need a car (moving to major metro areas where driving sucks, i.e. inside the Crapital Beltway).
You’ve got the Gen-Y behind the curve (lack of education and work experience) that is never going to afford the nicer cars (who gets much driving enjoyment out of a Corolla or Malibu?).
As the Midwestern concept of a middle class that developed Detroit dies, so will a Detroit style of cruising cars all weekend die off. Rich vs. poor, etc etc you’ve heard this one before – probably because it’s not true.
Disclaimer: I’m a Gen-Y (hate the term!) in the Midwest with a social science background looking to, uh, leave the Midwest (and take the car with me … yes, I know it makes no sense to park it in Boston or DC).
I think the explanation can be found in demographics. If you look at the most popular places for educated young people to move to after college, all of these places have public transportation. Portland, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, New York, DC. Not too many decide to move to Kentucky after graduating from MIT. Many graduates decide to live in urban areas before they marry and have children. The suburbs don’t have that much appeal to most energetic young people. Also, remember that young people self-identify as Democrats by a large margin. Democrats in general are more comfortable with urban life.
These urban areas may be bicycle friendly or have decent mass transit. If you need a car on the weekend to go on a ski trip, you rent one with some friends.
Going without a car can be liberating. There is a sense of freedom in walking, being one of the crowd on a train, or riding a bike on a bike path; that you just don’t experience with red-light cameras, drunk-driving checkpoints, or by having Smokey up your ass on a lonely highway. It is rare to hear about breath checks for riders on the subway.
So forget those ugly, Ann Coulteresque theories about girly men. The truth is that high gas prices and too much big brother law enforcement have resulted in making driving less pleasurable and have caused people to re-evaluate the whole car-centric lifestyle.
I’m not really sure where Gen Y starts, but I think I qualify so I’d like to bring my perspective in here.
I started learning how to drive on the way home from the hospital. I remember road trips with the family where I sat in the middle seat just so I could see my dad driving and out the front window at the same time.
Now that I can drive, I do it as much as possible. I come up with excuses to go somewhere, just so I can get in the car sometimes. Other times I don’t bother and I just go find a nice two-lane road to explore. Granted, some of that comes from the fact that I’m in college and busy enough during the week that most of my driving occurs Friday-Sunday.
Freshmen at Ohio State, like many colleges, are not allowed to have cars, but, even as an out of state student, I managed to have one up here for about a third of my first year. Well worth it.
Unfortunately, most of my friends do not share my passion for cars or the industry. A few do but not to the same extent.
I think we have things like the Nintendo Wii to blame. Think about that system for a minute. It allows you to play tennis in your living room. That’s cool, whatever. But the Wii also discourages kids from going outside to play tennis and other sports (with another human being, which would require social interaction, like making a friend). I find that pathetic. Looking for ways to entertain yourself, rather than getting entertained by something, is how people develop interests, one of which could be automotive.
+1 to the notion that the american love affair with cars may simply be ending. At some point, we probably had similar lamentations about the kids just not appreciating a good buggy like we did.
-1 to the notion that a lack of car infatuation makes kids (and I’m assuming males here) sissified. Hey Jack – guess what those emo boys still chase after?
And thanks to Jim Sutherland for starting the discussion. Amazing to me that we can go from the utter bullsh*t of the last thread to this kind of reasoned tone.
Could it be they’re (I should say “we”, since I’m 26) are more apt to live in urban areas into their 20s where cars are less needed, compared to the boomers who fled the city into the suburbs as the grew up in the era of urban decay? Just throwing that out there as a possibility–if you live in the downtown of New York or Chicago or even a smaller regional city like Charlotte it is possible to be without a car (or have one and only use it to get groceries, hence, little interest).
I have several friends like this. They don’t know how to change a tire. Don’t know how to change their oil. Don’t know anything about cars (even if they have one, its some used Corolla with a slushbox). Hey, I don’t get it, either, but I can assure you they’re not 27 year old basement dwelling virigns who sit in their mom’s basement and play marathon sessions of WoW while hyped on Mountain Dew “Game Fuel” and cheetos.
POSTSCRIPT: BTW, I grew up with Atari and then Nintendo. I enjoyed them. But guess what? I still rode my bike. I still climbed up in a tree house and have several broken bones to show for it. I still got outside and played catch. The notion that you can’t do both (real life AND video games) is f***ing stupid. If you’re normal and well adjusted you can walk and chew gum. Some malajusted fat geek that never gets outside isn’t that way because of Nintendo, he’s that way cause he’s screwed up. If he was growing up in the ’60s and not today it would have been comic books or board games instead of Nintendo.
I read an article once that said today’s guys talk about and work on their computers/phones/video game systems like guys used to talk about and work on their cars.
Now, I can’t imagine some of the geekier guys working on cars back in the day, but there might be some truth to it.
I think there are a lot of good points here. The restrictions put on licenses for new drivers, the high cost of gas and insurance, and I think a lack of cheap, fun, old cars. When I grew up, lots of guys had a used, RWD, V-8 powered car that they could mess around with, e.g. a early to mid-80’s Cutlass, Camaro, etc.
Now, what’s available? An old Corolla? I guess that’s OK if you’re in the tuner culture, but we aren’t talking about that group of guys.
I wouldn’t underestimate the impact of all the global warming and environmental “education” today. Don’t want to increase your carbon footprint, you know.
I suppose once GEN Y’ers start getting real jobs, marrying, reproducing, and moving to the ‘burbs, they’ll start buying more cars.
I still got outside and played catch.
As I understand it sports are much more compatative than they used to be. With kids playing travel soccer, going to camps and clinics, playing baseball year round etc. there isn’t he time or the money to pay for a car.
Well jmo I was talking about playing catch with my Dad or with some friends when I was like seven years old, not about competitive sports (though I did swimming and track@school.) But good point. I think that trend was JUST starting when I was growing up.
On the thought about how my generation is more urbanized, maybe we “cut the emotional umbilical cord” by moving to the city instead of getting cars. After all, that’s where our parents aren’t (their generation associates the inner city with race riots and skyrocketing crime, we associate it with Seinfeld and the like).
Something has bothered me for a long time. People are born every day. People die every day. How did certain ranges of birth dates get magically dubbed “a generation”? I understand that within the context of a certain real life family there are generations, but there are not “generations” of people in the larger society.
Good thread. A lot of points have already been covered, but I can offer my perspective as a Gen-Xer, which puts me close enough to the Gen-Yers to be affected by some of the same factors, but far enough away to be objective about it:
* Environmentalism is a part of it, but I think even more it’s tying into an anti-consumerism bent that’s been gaining ground recently, which in itself is due partly to…well, environmentalism, but also the recent economic woes, as well as a good old-fashioned case of reject-your-parents’-values (in this case, rampant boomer consumerism).
* Life takes longer than even to launch now. As others have already mentioned, you need a lot of education to compete these days. This means you’re going to spend a great deal of your young adult years in school, borrowing money you don’t have instead of earning it. Gen-Yers aren’t slackers or eternal adolescents any more than previous generations–they’re forced by circumstance to delay entry into the real world. That includes not only cars, but careers and families as well. Some of you boomer gearheads may find yourselves waiting quite a while for grandchildren.
* Urban settings do reduce the need for a car. And the trend of young people living in such settings during their 20s is only likely to grow.
* Not sure of this, but the cost of a car relative to income is probably higher than in years past. I’m guessing the cost of a new car has beaten inflation over the past few decades. It’s also true that cars last longer now than they did in the 50s/60s, so you pay more but get more. Still, the initial threshold to car ownership is higher.
* Yes, to some extent, the macho cache of owning a hot car has diminished in this post-feminist world, though I’m not one to think the sky is falling on that count. In the end, guys are still guys. Sometimes I think guys compete for girls in more subtle ways now. Smoking out your tires would be seen as a knuckle-dragging move. Playing in a band while pouting and wearing your skinny black jeans…different story.
Disclosure: I’m in the Bay Area, which probably isn’t a scientific reflection of the whole country.
My son in California is almost 18 years old and has little interest in a driver’s license. About half of his senior class in high school is the same. The other half seem to have been eager to get their licenses at 16.
In some ways, I think college graduates these days are like high school graduates when I graduated from high school in 1975. Most of my friends and I were pretty well on our own when we finished high school. I paid for my own college and law school.
My son and his friends won’t be on their own until after college. If then.
I have to chime in and side with the ‘cars are boring’ argument.
Today, cars are vastly superior, no question, but with rationalization and globalization, computer technology, the huge cost of R&D, there is virtually nothing truely unique, different, or special – it’s just too expensive to make a mistake, so they play it safe. That’s probably why 80% of new cars are some shade of grey or silver.
At one time there were fundamentally different design philosophies and technologies between makes; today pretty much every car in every class is fundamentally the same – its just a matter of where a consumer prefers their iPod hook-up located.
Sorry, but 90% of new cars are not fun or characterful. Safe, well engineered, reliable, comfortable with petty luxuries – yes, but so what? There will never again be a Citroen DS, a BMW 2002, a VW Beetle, a Datsun 240, a Corvair, or an AMC Gremlin…cars with stories behind them…for better or for worse, those days are over.
John Horner:
How did certain ranges of birth dates get magically dubbed “a generation”? I understand that within the context of a certain real life family there are generations, but there are not “generations” of people in the larger society.
Most of it is just media creating stories out of thin air plus human need to pigeonhole and stereotype everything.
Oh, in the US, unless you live in a large urban area, you need a license and need a car, that’s the reality.
criminalenterprise :
October 24th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
@PeteMoran:
If today your only portal extant to the freedom of the open road was an eight year-old used Saturn shod with Wal-Mart tires, you’d be taking the train home to play Gran Turismo 5, too.
Really, my original portal was a military green 1960 Valiant slant 6, 3 speed that was rusted out so badly I had 2×4’s bolted across the floor to hold the seats in and plywood laid down so water wouldn’t soak me when I hit puddles. Couple this with retread tires and an AM radio and I was THRILLED to death I had this machine.
Now many kids don’t seem to care as much. I have a 20 y/o and a 27 y/o working for me and they both could care less what they drive or if they drive at all. Bumming rides with friends is fine with both of them. The one kid has a Dodge Dakota with over 250,000 on it for a service vehicle I bought new years ago. I’ve offered to get him a new one but he could care less. Things have changed from when I lusted after Hemi RoadRunners and SS Chevelles. Many of these kids don’t seem to have the passion we did. That being said I’ve seen a lot of really nice work on hopped up Civics and such at the track. Just not as many involved as there used to be.
Two points.
One is that there is nothing inherently masculine about owning or operating a “hot” car. This is purely culturally conditioned / aka “marketing”. It’s like showing manhood by drinking a lot of booze with or without getting drunk. What a pile of (destructive) crap.
Second is that a modern Accord etc. is inherently boring. It’s only boring if the observer or driver regards it as such. Such cars pale only in comparison to cars that may well be excessive beyond being silly. Do you really need a car to get from Point A to Point B that’s like an earthbound executive jet? What about all those people all over the globe with all sorts of put puts, or even no car at all? Are they all deprived of interesting mobility?
Isn’t the modern Accord an engineering and performance marvel compared to most anything except the most recent exotic cars?
It’s like skis. People are conditioned to think they can’t enjoy skiing without the current year’s model. As if all the other people who ever skied on earlier skis were bored. In reality, the boredom is a function of conditioning and comparison, not of the ski or car by itself. You can apply as much intelligence and be as intensely involved in operating a kayak as a luxury yacht.
I was born in 1985, which I guess makes me a Gen Y-er. My first car was a 1985 Ford LTD Crown Victoria, an old, beat-up cop car with a 351 Windsor.
I hated it. I always smelled like gas, it was hard to start on cold winter mornings, it was awful on gas, and it was rare that I could look around and see a worse-looking car than mine anywhere. And the whole experience of owning and maintaining a car sucks: when you’re young and broke to begin with, you watch your paychecks slip away insuring it (no fun being male and under the age of 25) and fueling it (I had this car back when gas was $3–4 a gallon) and hoping nothing goes wrong to take even more of your money away. Our culture is, let’s be honest, overly reliant on cars when most people would probably be better served by public transport or bicycling or some other alternative made impractical by the dominance of cars. It’s easy to come to resent the things.
Anyway, when it came time to replace the ol’ bomber, I wanted to find any bland appliance-mobile and be done with it. My parents had a Taurus at the time, so I decided to get one too. I wanted a car that made no statement about me whatsoever. I ended up getting a 1998 Ford Taurus SHO (one of the much maligned third-generation ones). I thought the idea of a sporty Ford Taurus was ridiculous, but whatever, it had leather seats and a CD changer, I could afford to buy it cash, and anything would be a step up from the LTD.
Suddenly, I had a sport-tuned suspension and could feel the road and connect with it; I started driving with the window down so I could feel the wind and hear the traffic. I had a comparatively high-revving engine with a wide powerband and could zip around and maneuver a bit. I was in a different world. For the first time, I actually enjoyed driving for the sake of it, all because of a car that most people here probably think is garbage.
And I eventually came to appreciate the LTD for, you know, building my character and teaching me some things. Probably most of us here have had a car or two that only we could drive because of all its, uh, quirks, a total junker that you’re proud of just because you kept it running for as long as you did. And you know what? Even when I hated it, I would sometimes look back at that big hunk of steel and enjoy on some level that it was mine.
Maybe the problem with Kids These Days is they don’t have cars that inspire them in any way:
SUVs and big trucks are still what’s considered desirable (here in the southwest, anyway). That’s what everyone’s parents drive, so that’s probably what you’ll start your automotive journey with. You can’t learn anything about the passion of driving from a truck (on pavement, anyway); they ride like shit, they handle like shit. They accelerate with strength but no spirit. Maneuvering through traffic is done more with dick moves than with grace. They seem to do everything possible to divorce the driver from the sensation of driving. People decided that anything that seats fewer than seven and can’t tow a boat was impractical or uncool somehow.
Or maybe they’ll get a modest econobox, a Corolla or a Cobalt or something. Hell, when you, as a car enthusiast, see one of these driving around, you probably can’t help but think about the sticker price and about the awesome used cars you could get for less than that. A lot of people have an easier time getting financed and making payments on an awful new car than saving up for a used one and buying it cash. A lot of people aren’t willing to deal with their car occasionally not starting or having to replace the alternator themselves because there’s no warranty or the moonroof never working. For people who (quite rationally) just want something practical that will do the job and not give them much trouble, their options are completely soulless because of the American car industry’s inability to make a good small car and the Japanese car industry’s inability to make an inspiring one. And they won’t certainly buy a used German car and put up with a flaky electrical system for sake of the ride quality and precise handling if they never learned to appreciate these things in the first place.
And I hate to say it, but rags like Motor Trend and Car and Driver and even, to a lesser extent, enthusiast web sites like TTAC (which, don’t get me wrong, I love) put a lot less emphasis on the cheap thrills (like my humble SHO) and a lot more emphasis on slobbering over Audi and BMW’s latest offerings, which are certainly far out of reach of the average adolescent. I mean, I read some people complaining about that Datsun being picked as a Curbside Classic. Surely we’ve all strolled through our share junk yards and checked out some cars that, objectively, are pieces of shit but for some reason—some eccentricity in them or memory you associate with them or something—stir your soul in some way and merit some kind of admiration. I mean, what we’re admitting here is that the experience of owning a car is, when looked at completely rationally, utter drudgery: but we all have or have had cars that transcended this all in some way and caused us to throw rationality out the window and embrace getting there over being there.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is, I believe most people, young or old, don’t fall in love with driving because they haven’t driven cars that are easy to fall in love with or been around cars that have caused that effect in others. Until you’ve seen that passion, experienced it yourself, and had some time to let it simmer inside you and form an appreciation for it, it’s easy to live without. You don’t even know what you’re missing.
I try to drive any car I can now, just to see how they’re all different and good and bad in their own ways. Driving is a joy. Even navigating traffic is pleasing to me in its own way: maneuvering nimbly about and keeping a good stopping distance to maintain a good flow while others are slamming on their brakes and hitting the gas and cutting each other off, enjoying the feel of my wheels rolling over asphalt, the response of my steering, the wind in my face and hustle and the bustle in my ears. I love plowing through gears; I love throwing it in D and cruising. I love letting a well engineered, high-horsepower car whisk me away; I love getting a clunker going and feeling every inelegant vibration, 35 MPH feeling like 70. I love barreling a truck down a dirt road in the desert. But for me, there is no greater joy than topping off at a gas station, putting some music on, and turning onto the highway, knowing in that turn that I’ll be doing nothing for hours but cruising down the road to somewhere, anywhere.
I really do think the problem is largely that driving is no longer much of an adventure due to the cars and the roads.
Back when I started driving – in the mid 60’s – cars were not so reliable that one could just jump in them and go anywhere – especially the cars teens could afford. One had to know car repair, maintenance, and care to be able to have a chance on a successful road trip. Tires failed, brakes were not able to handle mountains if you weren’t aware of your situation, carburetors made starting at sub-zero temperatures unsure. And frankly to keep a car in good condition required some know how – which was impressive and something to be proud of. Much like getting a pilot’s license was an achievement.
And then there are the roads – back then there was no radar, and the roads were actually not crowded once you got out of the cities. The “open road” was. Driving was an adventure, you got to go places and do things that were off the beaten path. It was fun – and intoxicating.
Now modern cars are basically not owner repairable and so reliable that the new drivers don’t have to bother learning maintenance. So there’s no cred for being able to take care of a car. And most cars don’t have bench seats – so getting intimate is way more difficult..
Finally, the roads are so crowded that passing on rural interstates is often done in the right lane as the left is tied up with traffic. Only time the roads are open is in the dead of night – or WAY off the beaten paths.
So where’s the fun that would make young folks want to drive? Darned if I know.
@Typhoon
Great post. Couldn’t agree more.
Typhoon has an excellent descriptions of the issues involved.
While his post is well reasoned, I’d like to offer a stenographer’s version:
Cars = hassle.
It’s not a lot of fun. Expensive to own, insure, operate, park. You get fines. You get told of the hazards of driving and you end up being your friends’ driver if you have one. There used to be lots of open roads – now there’s gridlock.
And why did we want cars in the first place? To get around. How do people get around today?
While grown ups are at best immigrants to the internet, kids are residents. And they know how to use it. Judging by my daughter and her friends, they are spending the money traveling the world instead of being anchored to the limited radius of a beater.
(At War5cry – over a period of 45 years, you got a new car every nine weeks? What did you do to them?)
Any car that’s “fun” anymore is so expensive you have to worry too much about breaking it that it’s no longer fun. Add in gridlocked highways, nanny-state cameras, and police departments trying to make up for revenue shortages and any fun still around is quickly squashed.
I was a teenager in the 1990s and my friends and I would drive around all night on deserted roads and have a blast. In 15 short years all that has changed. Most of my friends now either don’t have cars or they still have whatever they brought to the city and left parked on the street. They think it will probably start if they decide to drive it again.
3 years ago my car was sitting in a garage for weeks at a time yet I was paying $185 a month for parking, $90 a month for insurance, $80 a year for city stickers, $80 a year for plates, $300 a month for the payment… I got laid off and it was the first thing to go. I never missed it. I got a new job pretty quickly and said to myself that I would get a new car when I got around to it. It took 3 years and that was only because we had a baby and felt that it was worth it just in case we needed to take him to the doctor or something and didn’t want to wait to schedule a rental.
We rented and took taxis around. Buses and trains too. There was even a period where we rented a car every single weekend for 3 months and even then it was still cheaper than what we were paying previously to keep a car in the city. Plus, I never had to worry about maintenance or car washes or even little dings and scratches (Hertz rocks, BTW).
Safety and room were the only real considerations when deciding which car to buy. If only car magazines and websites weren’t so focused on horsepower and 0-60 times. Or maybe they could find me a road within an hour of my place where I could stomp on the accelerator and not hit another car before I got to 60.