Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

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I&#x27;m an aging millennial, but on a purely personal level, when I lived in a city with good public transit, I was a lot happier, most of the time. I really like stepping off the train and the bus and being on my own two feet, the walking exercise, not being chained to this thing I have to worry about. I hate driving, I hate parking, I hate owning a car--the maintenance, the ongoing cost of fuel and insurance, all of it. I was happy to have it to leave the city, but overall, it was a last resort. I live somewhere that requires a car now, and it&#x27;s fine, traffic isn&#x27;t so bad, I like cranking my music and being able to haul shit around, but even then, I don&#x27;t get the emotional association of freedom that previous generations did. I don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s different, although I have some guesses. Money, I&#x27;m sure, but there&#x27;s something that&#x27;s nagging me about it. Maybe it&#x27;s the internet. Maybe it&#x27;s that communication technology makes the world feel closer and more immediate than it used to. I&#x27;d be curious to hear about how&#x2F;whether the experience of driving has changed over the decades, but freedom to my cohort means something else.<p>People get sanctimonious about not owning or using a car, and that&#x27;s annoying. I just wish there were more options. I don&#x27;t see us (in the US) removing car infrastructure. I could see additive changes, though, which include national public transit, with some political will and creative thinking, which means it&#x27;ll never happen.

The young are falling out of love with cars because they&#x27;re unaffordable. It&#x27;s as simple as that. It&#x27;s yet another sign the standard of living is declining for the young.<p>The average new car price in the U.S. is now over $47K (Consumer Reports). I make a good living and <i>I&#x27;m</i> not going to pay that kind of money for a new car! A young person would be <i>stupid</i> to pay that kind of money for a car.<p>Okay, so what about used cars? The average used car price in the U.S. is now over $28K (KBB). That&#x27;s more than I&#x27;ve ever paid for any new car I&#x27;ve ever bought!<p>What does that look like for a monthly breakdown? The finance costs for $28K is $525 per month. The average car insurance is $130 per month (US News). The average fuel costs are $100 per month (1,000 miles per month, 35 MPG fuel consumption and a fuel cost of $3.50 per gallon). Finally, the average maintenance costs are $25 per month (Consumer Reports). That cost goes up as the car gets older and doubles after the car is 10 years old, according to Consumer Reports.<p>Add it all up and that&#x27;s $780 per month. Now ask yourself, with those costs are you really surprised to hear the young are falling out of love with cars?

There&#x27;s 138 trains per day between Amsterdam and The Hague. It&#x27;s faster to take the train than to drive on that trip. Driving in either city in an exercise in frustration. Why would anyone in a rich country with a high functioning rail system like The Netherlands want to drive?<p>I don&#x27;t know how many rich countries that describes, but I lived happily for years in Boston in the USA without a car. I have one now but only because I have an off-street parking space for it. Otherwise I&#x27;d go back to renting one on the ~monthly occasions I want to use one. The main benefit of Zipcar to me versus owning is that the car <i>had a parking space</i> that it went back into.<p>Now if only the mass transit system in the area wasn&#x27;t falling apart and the rail connections to other cities were even half as good as the ones in the Netherlands.

The young are falling out of love with home ownership, cars, dating, drinking etc. I suspect a lack of money is the common factor.

Eh, this is a very city-centric view.<p>As discussed many times past, including on HN, if you live in or near a major city, <i>and</i> in a country or area which prioritises goood public transport, you can get by admirably --even better-- without a car.<p>As soon as you move even a little away from the metropolis, and&#x2F;or to somewhere that doesn&#x27;t prioritise good public transport, access (at least) to a car becomes close to a necessity for many activities. This rule holds true in my direct experience in the UK, US, Switzerland, and Germany.<p>For example, in the US compare living <i>in</i> Denver to a small town a couple of hours&#x27; drive out in the sticks. Or in the UK, living in one of the major cities to virtually anywhere in the countryside.

The article specifies rich, maybe beacuse, at least in the US, only the rich can afford to live in places where cars aren&#x27;t strictly necessary? Some choose to live elsewhere anyway, for scenery or privacy, but the poor or even median 60% can&#x27;t choose an area with a 15 minute walk to necessities. The Seattle walkability map on hn recently highlighted that fairly well I think?<p>I also wonder if it is truly cars or just driving that is out of favor? If so, will full self drive fix that if and when it ever arrives?

Millennial: same feeling here. When I talk to people of my parents generation they always talk about how cars let them roam about and give them freedom.<p>I never felt the same way, and I think a large part of that is that I grew up with the Internet; I could always AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) my friends or use ICQ. I was always connected even during an era of dialup. With the always-on functionality of modern phones, I’m sure that feeing is much more magnified. This doesn’t surprise me and I hope it drives a much more efficient future.

Some of us don&#x27;t want to impose the externalities of car ownership on others. The suburbanite who drives a car barely feels these inconveniences, but everybody else does.<p>Cars are dangerous to both pedestrians and cyclists. They make our streets noisy, our air polluted -- even electric cars shed particulates from their tires and their brakes. Cars require extensive amounts of parking, which is ugly dead space which contributes to sprawl.

If you live in anything like a real city and don&#x27;t absolutely need a car to commute, the misery of street parking alone vastly outweighs any kind of occasional benefit.<p>But it&#x27;s nice to have a license so you can rent a car if you really want to.

People are really out to lunch if they think this is due to people not wanting cars and preferring public transit. I wish that was the case, but it&#x27;s 100% because of the dire financial situation.

Italy is made of thousands of small towns, industrial areas far from cities, all poorly connected by public transit. I really would like not to use car, but them using public transport it would take me almost an hour from home to work, 10kms, it&#x27;s 15 minutes by cars. Also there are kids, if sick school will call parents to bring them home. I drive less than my parents did, if only because of higher gas prices, higher traffic and danger.

The article starts with a teenager in Portland, OR. If they had selected a teenager just south or north of the city, they would&#x27;ve had a very different perspective.<p>The value of having and maintaining a car is directly tied to whether you need it to perform the activities you enjoy. I enjoy taking my dog on hikes outside of NYC, so I pay the exorbitant cost of parking ($650 per month on the upper east side) to have a parking spot. If I didn&#x27;t have a dog, I wouldn&#x27;t have a car in the city. This is despite the fact that I personally love cars having owned a number of Japanese sports cars.<p>The focus of the article on climate change activism and urban planning is somewhat political, but I think it gets it right in the end: &quot;Several studies...have concluded that driving habits that are formed in youth seem to persist...even into their 40s.&quot;<p>This is exactly it. I grew up in a relatively remote area of Southern California and became accustomed to driving-in for school, to see friends, to take my dog on hikes, etc. Those experienced have formed a positive association with &quot;owning a car&quot; despite the displeasure of driving around looking for parking.

Cars are falling out of love with them. How is one expected to pay for a $1500&#x2F;mo apartment and a $40k car on a $60k salary?

I grew up in a very rural part of northern Florida. When I was 16 my parents said I’d have to learn how to drive so I could get to the job that I’d use to pay for a car.<p>I thought that was dumb and just decided to get by with less money and no car.<p>Throughout high school, I’d walk to the general store a mile away and that was about all I did other than go fishing (my favorite thing to do at the time). For a bit of money I tutored at school and tied flies (a fishing thing) for a local tackle shop.<p>In college I’d think nothing of walking 3-5 miles round trip for errands. Outside of peak school hours I was often the only person on the limited local bus system. I kept tutoring and writing grad school entrance essays for kids for money.<p>After college I moved to Portland, OR and still haven’t learned to drive (I’m 40 today). I walk and bike everywhere and take the bus once in awhile.

It&#x27;s been a decade-long journey but my wife and I finally got EU citizenship and are picking where to live (Utrecht and Freiburg are the frontrunners) specifically so our child can have a proper, independent childhood, and not the painfully lonely, infantilizing, ones we had in stroad-infested Californian suburbs. We&#x27;re not young! But I applaud this development.

My parents wanted to pay for my driver&#x27;s license when I turned 18, but I didn&#x27;t want one. (I wanted a good electric guitar instead, though it&#x27;s been stolen since.) Lived most of my life without a car, and so did my brother. Worked fine.<p>I only got a driver&#x27;s license when I got married and my wife insisted, because she didn&#x27;t want to the only one driving the kids around. (She mostly insists that she drives, though.) I still commute by bike.<p>In a well-designed city, most people don&#x27;t really need a car. Some do; some jobs really do require a car. My wife still travels to all corners of the country regularly, so we do have a car for that, but for me personally, a car would be a pointless expense.

I&#x27;m happy to see these statistics going in the right direction. There&#x27;s a lot to learn for old car guys like me.<p>Traffic was a problem on roads long before the internet. It&#x27;s not the car. It&#x27;s how we&#x27;ve attempted to scale cars via highways and stroads at the expense of everything around us.<p>I don&#x27;t hate cars. They&#x27;re not the problem.<p>The problem with enjoying cars as a mode of commuting is that cars don&#x27;t scale when the occupant-to-car ratio is 1:1, since the car is easily several times the size of one occupant. Cars could scale if the number of occupants was on average, greater than 1:1, as it is on planes, trains, and busses.<p>One way to make cars scale like larger vehicles is to reduce their size toward a bicycle or motorcycle. This is obvious from observing denser parts of the world.<p>The other way is HOV lanes. That hasn&#x27;t worked well around here where I&#x27;ve frequently been the only one on the HOV in the middle of stop-and-go, multi-lane, rush-hour traffic for decades.<p>The driver just made the decision not to carry more occupants under the guise of personal freedom. That&#x27;s an error for which we all bear the burden.<p>The hyperfocus on productivity, punctuality, and space-time in general is the problem with modern commute culture, ignoring the evolving dialectic on remote work. We did not create this, but we&#x27;ve certainly accepted it, - the triumph of commute-time over commune-time.<p>We may not all be pickled in the same diminishing-returns-on-more-cars culture, but we can transition to an increasing-returns-on-less-cars culture and simply learn to transit the earth more creatively, meaningfully, and multi-modally.<p>Commuting is a choice that should be optimized for the mutual benefit of self and society.<p>I, for one, really enjoy being able to read on a bus or a train (leave the driving to them) - ignoring self-driving because I don&#x27;t trust &quot;them&quot; any further than I can throw my near-autonomous medical device, because there isn&#x27;t any greater sacrifice in my mind than the feeling of agency that arises from having my hands on the wheel and the gearshift, whether bicycle, motorcycle, or car.

&quot;A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It&#x27;s where the rich use public transportation.&quot; - Gustavo Petro

In Montreal(and other places throughout Eastern Canada) we have a &quot;car-sharing&quot; program called communauto.<p>It&#x27;s pretty cheap and is competitive with a bus pass depending on where you&#x27;re going. It covers gas, insurance, maintenance, and you have access to all local parking permits. You can get essentially &#x27;unlimited rides&#x27; for less than 100$&#x2F;month.<p>I had a car off and on over the last couple of years, and I would barely use it, mostly just to change parking spots. I also sank a couple ~4k into repairs only to finally scrap it (I&#x27;m a bit of an idiot).<p>Communauto is a great inbetween, where I can do groceries, can go on extended trips. It&#x27;s a great option for the occasional (&lt;3&#x2F;week) or frequent in-city motorist.

Young people are quite often drawn to city life, and many big cities have a well functioning PT system. Driving in big cities, on the other hand, and especially parking is a nuisance and expensive.<p>At the same time, I recently saw a documentary about how young families are driven out of the cities and into the suburbs because apartments in bigger cities have become unaffordable for many of them. Also, life styles sometimes change as you get older - when you start a family, many of the amenities of city life become increasingly irrelevant, and raising kids outside of the city can also be more attractive for many. In such a situation, the perspective of having a car becomes a completely different one.

It&#x27;s like the Yogi Berra saying: Nobody drives, there&#x27;s too much traffic.<p>I mostly gave up a car living in Washington, DC. I still had one, but only because my apartment had free parking. It came in handy for occasional work trips and road trips, but day-to-day I walked or biked almost everywhere.<p>Yet, the main reason it was not useful was because the roads were so packed with traffic, at almost all hours of the day, that it was nearly impossible to drive anywhere. Let alone find somewhere to park that wouldn&#x27;t charge you $20.<p>If enough people fall out of love with cars, maybe it driving will become attractive again.

The article puts too much emphasis on political movements, when the answer is most likely economics and the increasingly sedentary lifestyle of the average youth.

I got my license just in time to be able to drive my pregnant wife to hospital to give birth, aged 33. Before that I didn&#x27;t really need one. Now I love my car and the life I want to live absolutely involve owning one (I don&#x27;t necessarily love the ownership part though...). I suspect a lot of young people will eventually discover the same.

My son (20 yrs old) like driving but he doesn&#x27;t like where new cars are going in becoming &quot;phonish&quot;. He wants a 1970s boat of car but in a place with severe winters and road salt I think we are adding a 2000-2010 vintage asian car to the motor pool at the farm but the state of the car market is a little intimidating right now.

I&#x27;m not sure if I still qualify as young, but yeah, I have no love of cars. I prefer bicycling and trains. (Or just walking for sufficiently short trips.)<p>Cars are a necessary evil in my life for the moment, but I hope for a future where that &quot;necessary&quot; part goes away.

I grew up in a small&#x2F;medium sized city with a bus system. I couldn&#x27;t wait to get a car and stop having to live my life around the bus schedule (especially on the weekends.)<p>I don&#x27;t buy this article&#x27;s argument. Outside of cities there will always be a demand for cars. My daughter just turned 16 and she&#x27;s working&#x2F;saving for a car and won&#x27;t shut up about it - which IMO is great...motivation to work hard, keep her grades up (one of our stipulations), etc. Same with all of her friends.<p>In cities with a functioning mass transit system, there&#x27;s very little need for the young or old to be interested or in love with cars. It&#x27;s the same as it ever was. This is literally a non-story.

I can afford a car but I really don&#x27;t want one and I haven&#x27;t had one in 10 years. I don&#x27;t think most people in American can really comprehend how much we&#x27;d benefit from more reliable public transit.<p>As others have mentioned though, cost matters too. AAA reported today that for new car owners the average cost of ownership has crossed $10,000: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.aaa.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;annual-cost-of-new-car-ownership-crosses-10k-mark&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.aaa.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;annual-cost-of-new-car-owne...</a><p>That&#x27;s a lot of buses and Ubers.

We have so many more options to get from A to B now compared to our parents&#x27; generation!<p>- Not just taxis anymore: Rideshare apps are available and easy to use<p>- More car rental&#x2F;carsharing options to choose from (e.g. Zipcar in the USA)<p>- Not just bikes&#x2F;motorcycles: Now one can buy E-bikes, or borrow E-bikes or regular bikes via bike share programs, now scooters are getting in on this too<p>- More intercity bus and train companies with decent amenities<p>- I don&#x27;t know how car rental companies were before. But they are still an option.<p>And we don&#x27;t have to pay for inspections&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;maintenance on any of that.

Probably depends a lot on where you want to live and where you will live.<p>Where I live now it&#x27;d be madness to want a car, just a huge obligation to take care of with very little use. Decent chance I&#x27;ll feel a bit different when I buy a place and am living in an area with much less frequent public transport options (but much more space to just leave a car sitting).<p>I would rather stay where I am than move out to somewhere like that though; and I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d ever see it as a positive trade beyond the ownership vs rental aspect.

Besides the financial and environmental reasons, I see cars as being misaligned with a frictionless culture that the young are used to.<p>It&#x27;s a real hassle to drive, park and do maintenance&#x2F;accreditation&#x2F;insurance on a car that most people simply accept because that&#x27;s the way things are done. Honestly, I&#x27;m 35 and I&#x27;ve always felt car-culture reminded me of smokers in the 60s: it&#x27;s terrible overall but most people can&#x27;t seem to see the problems since it&#x27;s so widespread.

Let&#x27;s hope the trend continues. Cars are terrible for us. They are bad for health because we don&#x27;t walk anymore or at least easy way less than 30 years ago. Children can&#x27;t walk to school safely anymore. We can&#x27;t play on the street. Cycling is very dangerous. Alternative light, healthier and greener alternatives are heavily discouraged by car centric infrastructure.<p>Cars pollute. Cars can kill you (and do kill many unprotected people every day). Cars make people disconnected from others and social connection suffer - you don&#x27;t just meet people on the street anymore, children don&#x27;t walk home which was always great time to socialize.<p>Cars are also terribly inefficienct way to get around. Even if you forget fuel cost, health considerations, pollution. They are just too big for everyone to have one and still be able to get around in a city in reasonable time. Bikes are already faster in many cities even with terrible car centric infrastructure and laws hostile to cycling. E-bikes with some infrastructure would be significantly faster than cars. And cheaper, and greener and safer and healthier.<p>Cars often take valuable land which could be used for residential buildings or recreational areas. Significant % of many city centers are parking lots. Significant % of many big buildings are parking lots as well. The cost of car centric infrastructure is humongous.<p>I am so happy this movement gets some traction. For everyone life quality getting rid of cars in cities would mean great improvement for life quality, especially young people and poor people.

of course they are, cars are expensive, dangerous, and dirty… traffic is miserable, maintenance is expensive, you can’t trust anyone else on the road… a car might be the worst thing I own but I live in a place where I couldn’t eat or get to the doctor’s office without one

I&#x27;m from a rural place, so car is more or less the only viable method of transportation. Next town over is 45 miles away, the buss goes 3 times every day (06:00, 12:00, 18:00) - and like most small rural towns, the shops are dying one after another. If you want to purchase furniture, appliances, or whatever, that means driving to the next town - or you could spend $100-$200 on delivery.<p>Luckily I moved away, but every time I&#x27;m back home I do feel the pain - especially during winters.

I really wished this demonisation of the car stopped. Modern cars are way more climate friendly than merely 10-20 years ago and many climate-conscious persons do pool to commute.<p>But we need to understand. There are cases where the car is a must. Unavoidable. Imagine having toddlers, having to do heavy groceries, and living in a place with difficult landscape or challenging weather. Imagine having a neurological disease or some other disability.

Two things:<p>A. In the US - driving sucks.<p>Populated areas: It&#x27;s gotten much more crowded on every road in the past 20 years. At least where I live rush hour is a joke - there&#x27;s a crash every day on the interstate, meaning traffic doesn&#x27;t get above 30mph the whole time I&#x27;m on the interstate. Local roads are also full of cars during these times and during most times. It&#x27;s not fun, and it&#x27;s not freedom, it&#x27;s an annoying necessity to live.<p>Non-populated areas: Far less crowded, but to get anywhere, you&#x27;re looking at long drives on twisty, winding roads. It might be fun at first, but then gets old. It&#x27;s not freedom, it&#x27;s an annoying necessity to live.<p>B. I think cars used to be a rite of passage for young people, and often the first way they would get &quot;out of the house&quot; and have a way to get privacy for their earliest girlfriends&#x2F;boyfriends. This is something that started to die in the late 80&#x27;s. Today&#x27;s young people are much poorer, much more worried, pissed, and disappointed in everything, much more isolated, and under much more restrictive settings in things they do such as school and such.

Young people in towns are going to be filling up the comments about how they don&#x27;t need a car. Trying living somewhere rural without a car.

I think another thing that&#x27;s being missed is that, due to EPA regulations, cars aren&#x27;t really all that sexy anymore. The Maserati MC20 is a V6. The C63 AMG is has dropped from its namesake 6.3-liter V8 already, and will soon be a small displacement twin-turbo i4. That&#x27;s not very exciting.<p>This wouldn&#x27;t be problematic if the replacement were better, but it&#x27;s not. Try going on a long road trip in an electric car: depending on your origin and destination, it may or may not be possible. It will take a significant multiple of the time it would&#x27;ve taken in an ICE car.<p>It&#x27;s no wonder today&#x27;s youth aren&#x27;t interested in anemic ICE cars - they aren&#x27;t as cool or exciting as they used to be. And electric cars are only really viable&#x2F;useful for the rich (with garages to charge them in) and&#x2F;or those who live in densely populated areas where they don&#x27;t have to drive very far... and those places usually have viable public alternatives that young people without families are happy to use instead.

I rode the Los Angeles and San Fran mass transit for years.<p>And it made me love cars.<p>I love having a little home base wherever I go.<p>I love not having to sit next to homeless people on drugs doing crazy things next to me.<p>I love being able to wear a nice watch and nice shoes and not having to constantly look over my shoulder worrying about being robbed.<p>I love being able to bring my little mini Australian shepherd dog without having to beg and plead with the government for permission and medical institutions for service dog paperwork because Pitbull owners exist and are exactly the people who ride mass transit.<p>I love being able to go anywhere at any time.<p>I love not having to rely on unreliable drivers of mass transit to get somewhere on time.<p>I&#x27;m sure mass transit works great in an idealic region of all middle class and upper middle class people.<p>But I would rather the downsides of driving than the downsides of having having to sit next to the seething teeming flesh of the average American anytime I want to go somewhere.<p>Also part of me wonders if mass transit works better in cities like New York in Chicago where the cold weather annihilates the homeless population.

I don&#x27;t have a car because I live in one of the densest cities in Europe with awful traffic and no parking.<p>Public transport can be slow and you get weirdos on it occasionally and it&#x27;s annoying if you want to visit somewhere without a train station like a castle or whatever - but it doesn&#x27;t seem worth the hassle of having one in the city.<p>I really wish they&#x27;d expand the train network though.

I lived in London, UK for 11 years (renting) before the pandemic so never bothered learning to drive, the public transport there is so prolific it&#x27;s almost seamless (tube, bus, overground, train, uber etc)<p>Since moving back into a midlands city and purchasing a house, it quickly became apparent that *not* owning a car was detrimental to quality of life, there&#x27;s a lot of aspects of home ownership where having a car just makes sense. Going to the DIY store to buy bulky items, going grocery shopping to do a &quot;big shop&quot;, moving stuff around etc.<p>So I got my driving license at 36 years old a few months back. It&#x27;s kinda awkward learning to drive at this age but I think I took it more seriously when I learnt a little bit at 17.<p>I&#x27;m still in the honeymoon period so quite enjoy the novelty of driving, the independence etc. I guess one advantage I do have with working remotely is I don&#x27;t commute to work, so all my driving is 100% leisure and I don&#x27;t drive during the peak&#x2F;rush hour times.

I expect in the future cars will be used for fewer but longer trips. Commuting to work should not be a thing, and most cities will adapt to the new reality where the home is also the office.<p>On the other hand people will seek better living quality in less dense areas and this makes the car necessary, however infrequently. Maybe the news of their demise is greatly exaggerated

No they aren’t. Even the article admits that public transport is shit.<p>It’s not even about the fact that it’s inefficient or you’re limited to specific routes or that it’s slow.<p>The core reason it’s so shit is because some trash person can just come on the bus and chef you up for looking at them funny. I don’t have to deal with trash people in my comfy lil car.

Surely we can come up with a better term than &quot;anti-car&quot; laws. In virtually all the cases I&#x27;ve seen they&#x27;re basically attempts to reverse over-dedication to car-specific infrastructure of precious urban space - i.e. to use that space for something that improves the urban environment for everyone - and yes, often including those who realistically have no choice but to drive (delivery vans etc.). Cars are great for many things, but most of reasons they&#x27;re not are because so many of us are given few realistic alternative choices due to the nature of how our cities have been built (which we had very little collective say in), hence we all end up using them for almost every journey, with predictable consequences. It doesn&#x27;t make sense to consider attempts to fix that as &quot;anti-&quot; anything.

EBikes are a huge win for mobility for people who live in areas that are sprawled and have poor access to transit.

&quot;Falling out of love with&quot; = unable to afford<p>Like in my city it&#x27;d cost at least $4000 to get a licence, and then $250 a month for indoor parking, $~200 a month or so for insurance, road tax, etc. and $~400 a month for the car loan.<p>After taxes and mortgage payment&#x2F;rent that&#x27;s just unaffordable (as a Europoor).

The issue to me is not so much ownership as self reliance. I’m Gen X and I can drive, cook, swim, ski, sail, fly and scuba dive. Perhaps I’ve taken things to extremes but it was important for me and my friends to become capable of looking after ourselves. I own a car, but not a boat, skis, scuba tanks or plane (though building the latter is a dream). Here in Australia public transport is actually pretty good in the inner cities but it really limits your opportunity to see the wider country. Owning a car doesn’t always make sense - I lived in inner Sydney for a few years happily without one. But I don’t really respect people that are in their mid-20’s or older and have to rely on others to drive them everywhere.

I’m an older millennial and quite on the side of being a car lover. I grew up in the very car-necessary Phoenix, but spent a while in Portland, OR, where I learned to appreciate commuting to work via bike.<p>Regardless, I still love cars. I have a small collection of euro classics and vintage Japanese models and I love restoring them.<p>I definitely see people have gone more toward seeing cars as appliances rather than appendages they love. And I can see the trend heading more toward an overall disdain with having to own cars or put up with them as pedestrians or cyclists. I wonder if when my daughters grow up if driving around my classics will actually been seen as cool or gross to their peers.

I grew up and lived in 3 cities in the US for most of my life. Having a car was a must in all of them. For the last 10 years I have lived in 2 european cities and not needed a car.<p>I <i>love</i> not owning a car. This is made possible by lots of good public transportation options around me. On the few occasions that I need a car I can easily rent one. I&#x27;ve only rented a car 3 times in the last 10 years, excluding trips to the US (where I always need to rent a car).<p>But also, modern cars are bananas. Between the flat screens replacing physical controls and the paid subscriptions to enable existing functionality, I want nothing to do with car ownership anymore.

I am in Bangkok right now and while there is public transportation at every corner the air quality is still super low. I took this post as the rich are falling out of love with LUXURY cars. I got passed by a Lamborghini today while walking the streets and said to my friend, while everyone else was busy trying to snap pictures, that I would only be impressed if he could do his own oil change.<p>I expect $tatus $ymbols to continue falling out of favor and be replaced by self sufficiency. Rich are also falling out of love with alcohol and falling in love with fitness. This is good for everyone.

I love cars but power law is undefeated.<p>It&#x27;s better to go to the track twice a month and have fun in a rented Ferrari or a Lamborghini for 10 very hot laps and then Ubering for the rest of the month moving from point A to point B.<p>The whole ownership of a car seems like useless as far as practicality and also cost. The A-B cars are owned by the community and the fun cars are owned by the track (or the rent company at the track). And I just use one or the other depending on my mood.<p>The whole cars as design objects I never bought into that.<p>Of course I live in a city and I don&#x27;t need cars to do heavy work.

Given today&#x27;s car aesthetics, I&#x27;d also fall out of love with cars.

I sold my car (a nice Lexus IS F) during covid, when used car prices went nuts. I had been calculating some healthy depreciation in the years ahead and saw this as an opportunity to get a good price for the car before things returned to normal and my car lost value. (It seems to have worked.)<p>I now find that I didn&#x27;t much need the car. My wife has a car, we share it. I&#x27;m a car enthusiast, but now I&#x27;m starting to wonder if we&#x27;ll ever go back to two cars for the pair of us.

I grew up obsessed with cars, I used to play racing video games almost exclusively, attend car shows etc.<p>I now work for a large german car manufacturer as a SWE. I cannot afford the cheapest car they make, it is literally more than I make in a year before tax. I don&#x27;t own car yet and I&#x27;m not sure I will be able to afford one in the next 3-5 years. I don&#x27;t even care that I (a former car nut) works for a car manufacturer when this would&#x27;ve been my dream job as a kid

I mostly use public transport, but I have a taxi budget (about 10 per cent of what my acquaintances pay for their cars yearly <i>in toto</i>) and I will use it for transporting anything heavy, very inconvenient weather or for necessary, but otherwise impractical connections.<p>I like this combination and I am glad that taxis exist. Some errands would be really weird-to-impossible without the ability to use a car, even if it is driven by somebody else.

I wouldn&#x27;t miss cars or driving if I went carless. I would miss my parents and other relatives who I simply can&#x27;t reach with public transport. I would also hate not being able to relax in middle of nature so well during weekends. Proper housing within reach of public transport also tends to be too expensive.<p>Going carless works mainly for people who have their whole lives around urban areas. For the rest of us cars are a necessity for enjoying life.

I can&#x27;t get through the paywall, but I&#x27;m one of these car-less youngs (although less young by the day).<p>Mainly it is for idiosyncratic reasons: I hate being confined where I can&#x27;t stand up if I want to, and I don&#x27;t like &quot;car smell&quot;. There&#x27;s something about the air inside motor vehicles that puts me on edge. I get the same feeling on buses and planes, but oddly not on trains, even though rationally I know the air must be of similar quality.<p>There&#x27;s the health benefits and the climate stuff and saving money and so on. But that&#x27;s not what I&#x27;m happy about about when I bike around; it&#x27;s about fresh air and postural freedom.<p>I&#x27;m glad I live somewhere where I don&#x27;t need a car to do everyday things. It&#x27;s not as bike-friendly as somewhere like Denmark but it&#x27;s tolerable.

I always liked cars as a kid. Faster the better. But Tesla kind of broke everything. A super car for 150k and its only going to get cheaper and faster as time goes by. There is no longer any parity. EV&#x27;s don&#x27;t have roaring engines, outside of the cringe fake engine noises some are adding. There is nothing to be excited about when your future 30k 4 door sedan can do 200mph, 0-60 in 3 seconds.

I am staying in Wynwood Miami for a month, and I rented a car. I was surprised to discover that the neighborhood as many amenities, coffee shops, etc in just walking distance.<p>My car has been staying in the garage most of the time. I feel, slowly, places are getting a bit more dense and have more things to do that are just walking distance, without having to deal with the hassle of driving&#x2F;parking, etc.

IME this is simply because young people are poor and have no use for the car.<p>If you live in a single room in a house in London, barely go outdoors, and have one shelf in a fridge, then a car is just far less useful to you as a concept.<p>If you live in a house and you go on outdoor adventures often then it&#x27;s a daily thing. I mean I transport wood, tools, large amounts of groceries, etc on a near daily basis.

I&#x27;ve been following the anti-car movement push on internet forums for a while. These people swear by NYC public transport, which IMO is the worst experience anyone could go through while traveling. Hustlers, crime, drugs, filth, long wait times etc etc. No thanks, I&#x27;d like to live and not get beaten up and not catch a disease, will stick to my car.

I really didn’t need a car till I had kids. I wonder if this is related to reduced birth rates and rising age of childbirth.

I personally do not miss using transit on a daily basis. It was cheap, yes, but feeling like a packed sardine while being harassed by mentally ill people did not make up for the cost savings.<p>My car isn&#x27;t even expensive. Go buy a Toyota or Honda. Hybrid? Even better. I&#x27;d happily pay a bit more monthly to be in comfort than to save a buck.

I think allure of cars for the young has always been that you can drive to where the &#x27;scene&#x27; is.. the interesting things.<p>For GenZ the &#x27;scene&#x27; is mostly online. There&#x27;s no reason to go to a particular place to hang out with friends, meet new people or see something cool, interesting, and different.

Aged 32. One of the biggest reasons I moved to NYC about 8 years ago was because I hated driving. I’m not good at it, gas and insurance is expensive, and you can’t do much in parallel when driving.<p>Taking the train everywhere has its issues but I would much rather deal with those than a car.

Lets wait for the young generation get older, born some kids, see how they, for example, cope with trains being cancelled on the day of travel (destroying their holidays with kids), and what they say about cars then.

A story about young people falling out of love with cars starts in Portland OR? Pardon me if I roll my eyes.<p>Most cities are not Portland, OR. Culturally, geographically or structurally. Show me this trend in Anywhereelseville.

Insurance costs, fuel, nowhere to park. Also the internet again. People have less need to go out, can talk to or play with your friends online, watch movies, no need to go shopping, just get it delivered.

This is just another reason why shared ownership and vehicle as a service is the way to go. It frees up so much resources, I think it has to be the better solution once a critical mass of users is hit.

I really enjoy road-trips. I live in dfw, an 8-12 hr drive in almost any direction is very beautiful and relaxing to me. (Directly south gets a little boring a couple hrs before Brownsville however)

Wondering if part if this is due to the sky high inflated prices of vehicles nowadays?<p>Back in the day, my first car was £700, with £400 insurance. It&#x27;s no where near that now, and this is only 19 years ago.

I think this is explainable at the margins by the lack of positive peer pressure to live a rich life, of which the car is just a symptom.<p>Case in point, a kid who (a) wants to have a job (b) wants to hook up and (c) wants to go to parties &#x2F; events still wants a car. What changes is that whereas in the 80s&#x2F;90s, a kid who sat in his basement pulling his pud would would be considered a loser and have pressure to not be like that. Today it&#x27;s totally acceptable. So there are simply more kids who aren&#x27;t even trying to have an out-of-basement life, so they don&#x27;t need cars.<p>I think it&#x27;s not that relevant. The kids who are going to grow up with more power (financial and social) are the ones that want cars today.

I calculated it, living in Dublin Ireland, it&#x27;s cheaper for me to just use taxis and public transport than owning a car. Im 40 years old and dont see the point in owning one.

The time to miss having a car is on warm summer afternoons and evenings, when one can just drive and drive and stop and explore and drive some more and just soak it all in.<p>Other times? Meh.

Young people feel it is necessary to live in urban areas, because that is where all the other young people are. Urban areas make car ownership annoying.

Can we accelerate this so that I can finally get a call back from any Porsche dealer to tell me I have a Carrera S allocation?

Cars? OR wheeled surveillance and infotainment devices? Because that&#x27;s a part of the issue.<p>Their price and wages are another.

I&#x27;m a graybeard, but I have never been in love with cars. I truly wish I didn&#x27;t have to own one.

“rich world”<p>cant afford a car. cant afford a house.

I don&#x27;t understand how to account for the fact that total vehicle sales in the US has not been dropping over the last 40 years despite stats like this from the article:<p>&quot;By 1997, 43% of the country’s 16-year-olds had driving licences. But in 2020, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number had fallen to just 25%. Nor is it just teenagers. One in five Americans aged between 20 and 24 does not have a licence, up from just one in 12 in 1983. &quot;<p>US vehicle sales numbers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;TOTALSA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;TOTALSA</a><p>The article states it&#x27;s baby boomers that account for increasing traffic on the road. So baby boomers are buying more cars per capita as they age? So much so that it&#x27;s offsetting these dramatic drops from the younger generations? I find that really hard to believe so maybe I&#x27;m missing something. Anyone able to explain?

In other news, the e-bike has finally arrived.

cars used to be universally rare. I bet anyplace where cars are rare they are popular among the youth.

Is it just me or does the article contain zero actual data on car adoption? Just anecdotes and talking to people who wrote books?

I suspect that the issue is more that money is falling out of love with them, (at least in the US)

Get a Subaru Impreza

I can&#x27;t read this due to the paywall, but taking the title as representative, and assuming the evidence to back the claim up is in the article (which I doubt):<p>It&#x27;s irrelevant whether or not the young are &quot;falling out of love&quot; with cars, cars are essential in the rich world (at least in my country, the UK) outside of a few urban areas well-served by public transport infrastructure - and non-EVs at that.<p>There&#x27;s a huge amount of development needed in that infrastructure before the luxury of choice will matter to the average Jo.

Cars were cool back when they were simple machines that you could maintain yourself. Now it&#x27;s full of electronics, cars are 10x as big as they used to be due to insane regulations, cars are slow and weak in order to maintain MPG regulations. People are falling out of love with cars because what made cars cool fun has been legislated away. Designs of cars have all become the same and lack any cool-ness. Cars are all white, gray, or black..no more bright reds or yellows. Now they&#x27;re nothing more than boring gray boxes to haul a person down the road