America's Generation Y not driven to drive

[kphoger]

Wow.  You really looked down into your mind and counted the tassles.  Who knew this forum would become a catalyst to self-discovery and. . . . OK, I'm done.

[sp_redelectric]

Some of the points were brought up above but I think it's more complex than just "they want to live in urban areas" - a common thought of certain vocal urbanists that like to proclaim their way is the best way and nothing else.

1.  In recent years it has become more difficult for teenagers to obtain a driver's license - mandatory education (and additional costs), that mandatory driver's education is not always available.

2.  Graduated licenses often require that younger drivers can't have other teenagers in the car, so driving to events (carpooling) is a no-go.

3.  Used car prices have skyrocketed.  That makes obtaining a car harder.

4.  More people lease cars, so having the hand-me-down is no longer available. 

5.  Many schools no longer offer auto tech, and many kids no longer have the desire to learn how to fix their cars.  Newer cars are also more difficult to maintain.

6.  Fewer jobs for high school students = less ability to earn money to own, operate, maintain a car.

7.  Higher fuel costs.

8.  Many schools have disallowed student parking.  I know my high school (granted it's been a few years) has only a very small amount of student parking available, and most of the streets surrounding the school have been turned into a residential permit parking zone.

Put all of these together, and it's no wonder why fewer kids are driving.  I know a number of teenagers that had no desire to drive while in high school, but once they turned 18 they got their license when they obtained a full-time job and didn't have to through through the graduated licensing and driver's ed requirements.  It's not that they don't want to drive...it's that there have been a lot of obstacles placed.

[agentsteel53]

3.  Used car prices have skyrocketed.  That makes obtaining a car harder.

I've never noticed this.  do you have any figures which support this? 

I've been buying used cars since 2003, and in my anecdotal experience, the prices have remained roughly constant, adjusted for inflation.

[kphoger]

Frankly, young people need to learn how to get around without a car before getting a car.  So many younger people would be utterly lost as to how to get to work if their car won't start.

While I've had a learner's permit since age 14, and had less-than-rigorous obstacles to obtaining a DL, and still managed to become a somewhat capable driver–I'm in favor of more obstacels to getting a license.  One reason is what I said earlier: that people need to know how to get around without a car.  But the other, bigger reason is that I did some stupid stuff when I was a high schooler, and I know I'm not alone.  Honestly, with some of the crap I pulled when I was younger, I shouldn't be alive.  I think that, with more extensive driver's education and a DL more difficult to come by, maybe I would have felt more ownership of the priviledge to drive.  Maybe not, but I bet so.

[corco]

I was able to buy a good running 1990 Dodge Colt with a body/interior in good shape in Seattle for $800 in 2006, but a purusal of Seattle's craigslist today shows no half-decent cars in that price range. This Volvo is about the best http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/cto/3117129197.html, but I'd rather have a fairly immaculate, at this point 8 year newer Colt.

Actually, this Mazda is pretty nice http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/ctd/3073144749.html... maybe I'm wrong

[agentsteel53]

I bought my current car - an '01 Taurus with 117000 miles - for $2400 last September.  I thought that was a very good price - about a 12 year old car, medium feature quantity, just over 100000 miles, not much over 2000 dollars.

in 2004 or so, such a feature set would've cost me about 1800, but I am willing to adjust for inflation.

maybe the price of absolute beaters has gone up?  I'd be very reluctant to trust a car under $1500 or so.  I'd run it into the ground in a week!

(the Taurus, in 10 months, has accumulated just under 50000 miles - it's sitting on something like 166120 as we speak!)

[Roadgeek Adam]

I see someone other than myself saw that article.

Ok, I am 21, my parents want me to get a license, I'm not really interested in getting one yet. My life isn't at the point where its an issue. I take the 814 home from campus every afternoon, get driven to campus in the morning,  I take NJ Transit trains into the city and to friends' houses.

I have a boaters license (have had since I was 16), which I've put to good use, but currently have no boat to drive. My sister does drive. When I was 6 in summer camp, I made a comment to my counselors that I wouldn't be driving until I was 24, which means 2015. I am kind of hoping and not hoping at the same time it doesn't becoming prophetic 18 years after being stated.

I also didn't go to a normal high school and never had Driver's Ed in 10th grade, my sister did, so I never had any practice. At this point I am setting the line at failing the drivers test about 10 times before passing. Conf.$10 I go more than 10. When I first started driving a boat, I had issues with being very quick on stopping the boat, which while easier on open water, is not so nice on the road. Plus, I am afraid of parallel parking, even after watching the rest of my family do it.

The other reasons I have, I am fat, 276 lbs fat, I have my bike at the repair shop being fixed. Right now exercise by walking and biking its a big importance for me, so its better right now. In the heat, like we're in now, I get a breeze while biking, so its cooler than being in the car.

I will get a license some day. It just won't likely be until I am at least 22 at a minimum. I told my parents I would try after I turned 21 because of NJ's goofy nanny laws, but I really doubt I will try. 

[mgk920]

3.  Used car prices have skyrocketed.  That makes obtaining a car harder.

I've never noticed this.  do you have any figures which support this? 

I've been buying used cars since 2003, and in my anecdotal experience, the prices have remained roughly constant, adjusted for inflation.

The ill-advised 'Cash for Clunkers™' program of a few years ago removed a lot of good serviceable cars from the used market, which has not yet recovered from that.  Also, cars these days are far more reliable and durable than they were a couple of decades ago, making them more valuable when they do come onto the used market as well.

Mike

[corco]

I have extensive experience driving cars and boats (I worked at a marina for three summers), and I find driving a boat to be way harder than driving a car- I'd say that somebody who can park a boat with ease definitely has the ability to maneuver a car in heavy traffic.

Stopping a boat quickly is pretty hard- definitely a lot harder than stopping a car quickly. To stop a boat quickly you have to slam into reverse and then steer out of it- stopping a car quickly just involves putting your foot on the brake.

Personally, I find parallel parking to be about on par with maneuvering a boat into a boat slip

[Takumi]

Actually, this Mazda is pretty nice http://seattle.craigslist.org/sno/ctd/3073144749.html... maybe I'm wrong

Those 626's are notorious for automatic transmission failures. Once on Craigslist I saw at least six of them for sale with bad transmissions. If it's a 5-speed, no such problem, but another thing about today's cars is that fewer manual transmissions are seen; they're almost a luxury in newer cars.

[corco]

That one looks like a five-speed

[Takumi]

Yeah, it is. Depending on the mileage, that is a great deal.

[mcdonaat]

My little car gets good gas mileage, and I always take a mini-road trip to get somewhere. My family gets mad at me when I'm supposedly "wasting gas," but I feel that if I can pay to put gas in at $30 a tank, which lasts 2 weeks, I can afford the $6 in gas to take a drive along the Mississippi River. Generation Y'ers would benefit from taking a drive somewhere on the weekends, and appreciating what is outside the realm of the PS3 or 360.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

3.  Used car prices have skyrocketed.  That makes obtaining a car harder.

I've never noticed this.  do you have any figures which support this? 

I've been buying used cars since 2003, and in my anecdotal experience, the prices have remained roughly constant, adjusted for inflation.

The ill-advised 'Cash for Clunkers™' program of a few years ago removed a lot of good serviceable cars from the used market, which has not yet recovered from that.  Also, cars these days are far more reliable and durable than they were a couple of decades ago, making them more valuable when they do come onto the used market as well.

Mike

The only people "cash for clunkers" was ill-advised for were those auto repair shops that worked the grey market for used car parts. Manufacturers of new cars and new car parts were helped by the program.

[corco]

Except for the fact that despite the disguise of monthly payments and better MPG, it's still indisputably cheaper to drive an old 20 MPG car than a new 40 MPG car over the long run... Even the cost to replace a head gasket or transmission or both is still going to be less than a brand new car in nearly all cases.

I'm as pro-auto industry as you will ever find and I appreciated the attempt, but that was terrible policy.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

Except for the fact that despite the disguise of monthly payments and better MPG, it's still indisputably cheaper to drive an old 20 MPG car than a new 40 MPG car over the long run...

That's like saying sticking with a bachelors degree in Geography is better than getting a graduate degree in Geography as well.

[corco]

If you're making minimum wage, you're better off buying  low MPG clunkers and running them into the ground than buying a brand new car and being stuck with payments- cash for clunkers ran a lot of people into debt- moreso than those who forgoed the program over the same time period.

Yeah, it's better to get a grad degree, but if you can't afford a grad degree it's definitely a terrible idea to run yourself into student loan debt just to get one. Best to work for a while and save some money and get one a few years down the line.

And as somebody with  a bachelor's in Geography that is about to get a master's in Planning, I'm realizing it's going to take a long time to pay off the actual cost of the degree in salary- fortunately I was subsidized by scholarships/assistantships and worked full time to cover the difference, because otherwise it definitely would not be worth it.

[Scott5114]

Don't forget, part of Cash for Clunkers was environmental policy–it was seen as desirable to lower fuel consumption by taking a lot of 20 MPG cars (most of which probably didn't meet modern emissions standards) off the road all at once.

It is still possible to get great bargains on cars, but you have to be creative and work for it. I have a friend who is one of those bargain hunter guys–you know the type, older guy, always going to auctions of every kind (storage, auto, municipal) and garage sales, consummate salesman, could probably haggle a car salesman into throwing in his suit as part of a deal. Lately he's taken up flipping cars for something fun to do in his retirement. Today he was showing me a rather swanky-looking 1999 BMW he got at auction for $1500. Apparently he details them and manages to sell them elsewhere for a few hundred dollars profit. Of course it helps that he knows what he's doing (he managed to get a Ford Explorer for extremely cheap once because it was listed as not running but on closer inspection simply had bad spark plugs) but if you are really dead set on getting a cheap car it's rather doable.

[kphoger]

Except for the fact that despite the disguise of monthly payments and better MPG, it's still indisputably cheaper to drive an old 20 MPG car than a new 40 MPG car over the long run...

That's like saying sticking with a bachelors degree in Geography is better than getting a graduate degree in Geography as well.

The Master's is only worth it if you're going to actually need it in your profession.  I used to work in a warehouse with a geography major college graduate.  I'm sure we've all met people who spent a lot of money to get a degree they couldn't actually find work in.  I bet many of them would trade their title back in for the money they spent to get it.

[agentsteel53]

Except for the fact that despite the disguise of monthly payments and better MPG, it's still indisputably cheaper to drive an old 20 MPG car than a new 40 MPG car over the long run...

That's like saying sticking with a bachelors degree in Geography is better than getting a graduate degree in Geography as well.

except your degrees expire after several years and you have to get them again.  (or, the way I use my degree, it would expire after one year!)

[Duke87]

The cheapest possible way to own a car is to buy one new, paying cash for it upfront (no loan, no interest), and then run it all the way into the ground. Of course, you need to be able to save up enough money to do that.

As it is, I sort of fall into the "not driving" category. I don't use my car for commuting, though I do occasionally have to use it for work and obviously sometimes I use it for pleasure. My lifestyle simply demands I own one. I can't be confined to not being able to easily travel where transit doesn't go, like so many people my age seem to be perfectly willing to do.

[J N Winkler]

The cheapest possible way to own a car is to buy one new, paying cash for it upfront (no loan, no interest), and then run it all the way into the ground. Of course, you need to be able to save up enough money to do that.

I don't think that is normally the cheapest way, because one-third of the purchase cost is lost as depreciation in the first year and two-thirds is lost to depreciation after three years.  I don't think there is a unique cheapest ownership path; minimizing ownership cost forces you to arbitrage among fuel cost, depreciation, and repair cost, and the answer will vary according to how long you plan to own the car and how old you would like it to be when you buy it.  (That said, my parents' usual practice since the mid-1970's has been to buy new, paying with cash, and hold until a limiting point of mechanical senescence is reached, usually 13 to 20 years later.)

Corco's observation that a 20 MPG clunker is cheaper to own than a brand-new 40 MPG car is based on the fact that depreciation costs are typically much greater than the difference in fuel cost between 20 and 40 MPG, even at the current high prices for gasoline, for typical mileages.  If you drive 10,000 miles a year, your car gets 20 MPG, and gas costs $3.50 a gallon, you are paying $1750 a year for gasoline.  With 40 MPG, this drops to $875, so the annual savings in fuel consumption is $875.  This is considerably smaller than $5000 depreciation cost in the first year for a $15,000 car, or $10,000 depreciation cost spread over three years for the same car.  The arithmetic becomes even more lopsided in favor of clunkers for cars with relatively small annual mileages and well-documented maintenance and repair histories (such as my eighteen-year-old Saturn which currently gets driven probably less than 1500 miles a year).

Another variation on this basic approach is Click and Clack's recommended minimum ownership cost path--buy a 10-year-old car, keep for one year, then buy another 10-year-old car.  This strategy is based on the assumption that any repairs a 10-year-old car is likely to need (due either to component wear or lack of maintenance) can safely be deferred for a year, at which point the car can be sold for only slightly less than it was bought the previous year, and the repairs become someone else's problem.

Buying new is essentially a pay-more-to-get-more proposition.  The main advantage is that if you choose for reliability, you are not limited to overmaintenance as a strategy for limiting repair costs.  However, you have to work hard to "bank" the extra life so that you can keep the car cosmetically acceptable and running smoothly right up to the final episode of systematic failure.  For example, it is foolish to buy new without the ability to garage the car.

[Beltway]

<<< For example, it is foolish to buy new without the ability to garage the car. >>>

Hmmm ... I bought new 10 years ago, and don't have a garage or car port at my house.  Modern bodies and paint technology holds up just fine when the car is kept outdoors.  No rust or deterioration at all.

For that matter, the previous 2 used cars I bought before that, 1994 and 1990, never had any body or paint problems either.  I had the 1990 car until 1998, and the 1994 car until 2002.

[J N Winkler]

Beltway--if that has been your experience, I would say you have been fortunate in terms of climate.  I have seen many older cars with faded seats, cracked dashboards, oxidized paint, peeling clearcoat, etc.--all of which are at least partially a result of outdoor sun exposure.  My family had a 1986 Nissan Maxima (October 2005 manufacture date, purchased in autumn 2005) for 22 years and it was garage-kept for only the first ten years; by the end of the 22nd year it had serious problems with paint oxidization and peeling clearcoat.  My current ride has leather seats and after about three years of steady sun exposure there is bad wrinkling on the tops of the back seats, which are in direct sunlight.

I would agree that rust formation on underbody components, wheel arches, etc. has become much rarer with the widespread use of electrophoretic deposition, robotic welding, and better quality control generally.

[Duke87]

Paint on new cars is different from paint on older cars. So are the bodies themselves. I have some scratches on my back fender but I've just let it stay that way rather than pay to get it touched up since the fender is made of plastic and can't rust.

As for the new versus used debate, perhaps it depends on where you shop but my father and I looked around when I was looking to get my car and found that your average used car at one of the local dealers (3 or 4 years old, having just come off a lease) was being sold on average at maybe a 25% discount over the new price, with about 25% of the life of the car (and the best 25% of the life of the car, at that) used up. So we decided there was no point in getting anything used. Finding an old clunker may have been cheaper but that option was never considered, since neither of us wanted to deal with the reliability issues of buying a clunker or the uncertainty of you don't know what any of the previous owners did to it and what condition is it really in. I in general don't like buying anything used if I can avoid it, for this reason.