Millennials Don't Drive--And Here's Why They Aren't Likely To Start Anytime Soon

[english si]

I think that Brian's point was that one-parent families aren't able to afford cars for their kids, not that there's too many kids for parents to buy cars for.

So saying that one income doesn't stretch as far as it used to is backing him up.

It's also not totally true - pretty much everything but housing and saving (ie putting money in the bank) is cheaper in real terms now than in the 70s. We just 'need' more stuff to live, like smartphones and computers.

[NE2]

If you can tell what someone meant to say, just let it go.

Heh heh. Did someone say man asses?

[1995hoo]

Finances are an issue regardless of family size.  It takes two incomes to do now what one income could do in the 70s.  In a two parent family, it's likely that both parents work and have to pay for daycare.  College costs are also a big faster as they have risen by an ASTRONOMICAL amount.  It used to be possible to pay for college with no financial aid by flipping burgers in the summer.  Now, you can't even pay for textbooks doing that.  Now, you could buy a brand new Tesla for the cost of one year of college (and I'm NOT exaggerating; the 2015-2016 cost for year at Clarkson University is about $57,000, which is the base price of a Tesla Model S BEFORE the tax credit).

When I was in law school (Duke University) in the 1990s, the annual cost was around $35,000 per year. It seemed steep enough then, but I was shocked to see recently the annual estimated cost has risen to about $77,000. As I said, that's per year! For the current academic year, tuition alone is $54,460! (Recognizing parents are typically not involved in paying for postgraduate education, that's even more of a colossal sum of money.) I have no idea what the undergraduate cost is, but damn! Duke, interestingly, has more graduate and professional students than undergraduates. I wonder how common that is at private universities.

The spike in higher education costs in the past 20 years is astonishing. My father told me my undergraduate tuition (just tuition, not including textbooks or housing or the rest) at the University of Virginia as an in-state resident was around $5000 a year. It'd now be around $12,600 or so, which is still a massive bargain by today's standards and helps explain why admissions there are so competitive. If I were applying today with the same grades I had 25 years ago, I'd never get accepted.

[J N Winkler]

Back when Ward and June were raising Wally and Theodore (the Cleavers from "Leave it to Beaver" for you youngens who were deprived of watching fine quality TV programming  ), one income could easily support a household, allowing the wife (in 99% of the households) to stay home and tend to the house and children. Inflation and value of the dollar (gold standard vs market trading value especially) really put a hurt on "the traditional family".

Actually, the Leave it to Beaver scenario was true only for the middle classes.  In the working classes, both parents had to work and quite often the wife might be the only one of the two to be gainfully employed, especially in the years following World War II when there was veterans' preference and men who had either not been drafted or had been inducted into the army but not sent overseas had difficulty finding jobs.

My paternal grandparents finished high school but had no college degrees.  My grandfather was drafted in 1944 but was at Fort Sam Houston, fixing typewriters, when the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  He was thereafter without regular employment until 1949.  My grandmother supported the family by working first as a saleslady at a department store and then as a customer-service representative and executive secretary at Southwestern Bell.  My grandfather eventually got in as a machinist at the Wichita Eagle (fixing newspaper presses) but worked second jobs for most of the following two and a half decades until he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

My grandparents were far from alone in doing this.  My parents have family friends close to their age who also remember their mothers being the breadwinners in the family because their fathers weren't in the war and couldn't find jobs right after 1945.

I'd also question the assumption that children won't respect their cars as the expensive investments they are if they are simply given them, as opposed to having to work for them, take out loans to buy them, etc.  There are certainly a few spoiled kids with rich parents who see cars as an entitlement and assume they can be repaired or replaced easily if they are wrecked or mistreated.  But there are also many kids who cherish their first car and see it as an opportunity to learn all about automotive engineering, and about the economics of trading off maintenance against repair costs, e.g. by using full-synthetic instead of dino juice but keeping the oil change interval the same until the inside of the engine virtually gleams.

[GCrites]

I've read a lot of stories about $25 used cars in the old days.

[PHLBOS]

I've read a lot of stories about $25 used cars in the old days.

My brother paid $65 for a drivable 10-year old Chevy back in 1977.

[Pete from Boston]

That's like spending a few hundred today, and it happens ("driveable," of course, not being a synonym for "inspectable" or "good idea.")

[1995hoo]

I bought my first car, a 1977 Ford Granada, for $325 in 1989 from a guy at my father's office. It was an OK car for a high school student, I suppose, although it was a piece of junk in most ways. I sold it to my brother for $400 two years later because by then it had an upgraded radio and a new paint job.

[algorerhythms]

In 2004 I got a '93 Taurus for $250. It wasn't driveable, though, because the previous owner had run it without coolant and cracked the heads. I ended up trading my previous car (an '87 Blazer which had been damaged in an accident) for a engine for the Taurus. I still have the Taurus and it still (mostly) works, but I doubt it would pass an inspection...

[kkt]

It's also not totally true - pretty much everything but housing and saving (ie putting money in the bank) is cheaper in real terms now than in the 70s.

Education and health care are also much more expensive.  Note that the consumer price index doesn't include those little items.

What's cheaper is electronics and consumer goods made in poor countries.

[kkt]

Inflation and value of the dollar (gold standard vs market trading value especially) really put a hurt on "the traditional family".

The price of gold is a very poor measure of prices generally.  Remember, gold was officially $35 an ounce from 1933 to 1974, and you couldn't buy it unless you were a jeweler or dentist.  Since then, the gold price at least reflects a free market, but it's more a measure of the financial markets anticipating a crisis than costs generally.  And the market is so small that a single country deciding to sell some of its gold reserves or a single mine opening or closing can have an oversize impact on the world price.

Putting the prices in terms of wages gives a clearer picture.  (And it's not pretty for the middle or lower classes.)

[vdeane]

I think that Brian's point was that one-parent families aren't able to afford cars for their kids, not that there's too many kids for parents to buy cars for.

So saying that one income doesn't stretch as far as it used to is backing him up.

It's also not totally true - pretty much everything but housing and saving (ie putting money in the bank) is cheaper in real terms now than in the 70s. We just 'need' more stuff to live, like smartphones and computers.

I never said anything about "too many kids for parents to buy cars for".  Wages have been stagnant and prices have gone up on this side of the pond.  In addition to education costs, groceries have been increasing steadily, and gas is MUCH more expensive (I still remember when $2/gallon gas was unheard of and I'm not even 25 yet AND I live in a state with high gas prices), not to mention health care.  I also got the sense that Brian was blaming the existence of non-traditional families for parents not being able to buy cars for their kids, which my point disproves (not to mention that the nuclear family is still dominant, even if less common).

[PHLBOS]

That's like spending a few hundred today, and it happens ("driveable," of course, not being a synonym for "inspectable" or "good idea.")

My first car was a 1969 Ford LTD that I paid $300 for in 1982; and, yes, it did pass MA's state inspection (which was still twice a year back then).

[Brandon]

And the original article was baloney, as I previously claimed.

Millennials embrace cars, defying predictions of sales implosion

Behind paywall, so here it is:

In recent years, it has become widely accepted that millennials don't like cars.

According to conventional wisdom, the generation born from about 1980 to 2004 prefers public transportation or Uber. They get jazzed about the latest iPhone, not the new Ford Focus. Cue dire predictions for the auto industry.

Turns out the doomsayers may be wrong. Millennials – also known as Generation Y – accounted for 27 percent of new car sales in the U.S. last year, up from 18 percent in 2010, according to J.D. Power & Associates. They've zoomed past Gen X to become the second-largest group of new car buyers after their boomer parents. Millennials are starting to find jobs and relocating to the suburbs and smaller cities, where public transport is spotty.

Hayley Born is typical. After studying medicine in New York, she's moving to Cincinnati for her residency and bought a new Hyundai Elantra to get around. Born, 27, acknowledged she and her peers have been "delaying adulthood," but are hitting "life milestones" that often necessitate buying a car. She could have bought used but practicality won out.

"The convenience of having a five-year bumper-to-bumper warranty was not to be understated," Born said.

Millennial car buyers are emerging at a pivotal moment for the industry. Boomers' share of new auto purchases peaked in 2010 and will only go down from here, according to John Humphrey, senior vice president of automotive operations at J.D. Power.

Mark Reuss, who runs global product development at General Motors, never bought into the theory that Gen Yers disdain the automobile. "That's insane," he said earlier this month. Millennials haven't been buying cars because "they don't have jobs. Our internal research says that they've only been able to afford used cars, if anything at all."

Now that's changing. The employment rate for 25- to 34- year-olds held at 76.8 percent in March from the month before, the highest level since November 2008, according to Labor Department data. After lackluster growth throughout most of the recovery, wages are also starting to pick up for millennials.

Even though cars are getting more expensive, long-term, low-interest loans are making them affordable. When stage manager Niladri Sinha, 25, decided to replace the used Toyota Prius he totaled last year, he weighed buying, leasing or signing up for a car-sharing service. Ultimately, he decided to purchase a Subaru Crosstrek because he figured buying new would save him money in the long run. With a seven-year loan, his monthly payment is $250.

"When I tend to come across a chunk of money from freelance work I try to put that towards the car, on top of the monthly payments," said Sinha, who lives outside Boston.

In a happy coincidence, the industry is in the midst a technological revolution. The latest iteration of wired, smart cars plays well with a generation that grew up and live online. Newer cars are also more fuel-efficient and spew less pollution, a boon for environmentally conscious millennials.

"The idea of what kind of car people want is changing," Born said. "It's cool to have a Tesla, not cool to have an Escalade."

Entry-level compacts stuffed with technology are selling particularly well to this cohort. For about $19,000, a recent college grad can buy a standard Honda Civic, featuring Bluetooth capability and the Eco Assist System, which teaches drivers how to squeeze more miles out of each gallon of gas.

Of course, many millennials still can't afford to buy a new car. When Evan Hudson, 26, graduated from college in 2011, he took one look at the job landscape and headed back to school, saddling him with student loans he's now paying off.

So for the time being, Hudson, a 3-D modeler at a New York startup, will probably buy a used vehicle. Still, he enjoys customizing and tinkering with cars and is particularly keen on a revamped Ford Focus expected to debut in the near future.

"There's a bunch of cars coming out in the next two or three years that I really want," Hudson said. "Then I can get it new."

Like some of us were trying to tell folks, they need money and jobs first.

[ET21]

I can say this article is bullshit cause I'm a millennial, I might be broke, but I love driving 

[PHLBOS]

I can say this article is bullshit cause I'm a millennial, I might be broke, but I love driving 

Which article: the OP's or the one that Brandon recently posted?

Of course, the latter article seems to focused on new car purchases.  Typically, used car purchases encompasses a much greater percentage of the overall vehicle purchasing pie; regardless of age demographic.

[vdeane]

I've been saying this all along as well.  Ironically enough, recently I just met a millennial who doesn't like driving (at least outside of rural areas).  The only reason she even learned how to drive is because her parents forced her to (it was either learn to drive or drop all her extracurriculars).  She currently lives in the city, has no car, and takes the bus everywhere.

She also doesn't like suburbs, though she's fascinated with Malta because it has so many roundabouts.  She likes them because they force cars to slow down to the speed of her bike.

While she does acknowledge that cars can be useful in suburban/rural situations, arguments like "but I can go wherever I want whenever I want" and "I don't feel like hauling my groceries to/from the bus stop" don't work on her.  I didn't bother to try "my commute is longer than your commute and takes half the time".

[kkt]

She also hates suburbs, though she's fascinated with Malta because it has so many roundabouts.  She likes them because they force cars to slow down to the speed of her bike.

Malta, the island in the Mediterranean?

[Pete from Boston]

She also hates suburbs, though she's fascinated with Malta because it has so many roundabouts.  She likes them because they force cars to slow down to the speed of her bike.

Malta, the island in the Mediterranean?

The one not terribly far from Rome, Syracuse, Ithaca...?

Goddamn 19-century neoclassicists.

[vdeane]

Malta the suburb of Albany that has 16 roundabouts and counting within the town limits.

[The Nature Boy]

Living in Albany without a car sounds like torture. Is public transit THAT reliable and extensive?

[vdeane]

It seems to be decently reliable for her.  Of course, she's currently riding the CDTA busses for free, and will be until she finishes her masters degree (it's a benefit for SUNY Albany students).  It goes a decent amount of places, and has been expanding as of late, but it's also worth noting that she lives IN the city, doesn't travel deep into the suburbs, and isn't afraid to walk a couple miles to/from the bus stop on each end.

[ZLoth]

Hmmmm.... how much are the parking fees? I know that for California State University-Sacramento, the daily parking is $6 or a semester parking permit is $165. However, a public transit pass is included as part of the registration fees. For the first part of my college career, my workplace was close to the university, so I ended up parking at work and taking the bus to campus. But, when I switched jobs, that plan no longer worked out.

[SignGeek101]

I take the bus to university everyday. One bus, no pain about worrying where to park or if my car's going to break down. 30 min from home, and I'm there. Bus passes also can count towards a tax break as well. At least for now, there is no incentive to get a car.

[The Nature Boy]

This is going to come across the wrong way to some, but I don't GET people who can live without cars. Do you never want to venture outside of your bubble? I haven't had a car in 4 months and I've nearly gone crazy from not being able to leave and explore. I'm restricted to as far as public transit can take me and that's infuriating. I've been to Tyson's Corner, Virginia more times than I care to admit just because the Metro goes there and it's about as far as I can get without using Amtrak or one of the intracity bus lines. I like exploring rural areas so neither option works particularly well for me anyway.

I'm a road geek though so maybe I derive more pleasure from driving than the average person.