- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
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Genz can’t afford a car. Even used cars cost too damn much
Millenials can’t afford cars…
That’s the real issue. It is 100% not that they’re more environmentally cautious. Between less 16 year olds having jobs and cars and gas and insurance being so much more, less can afford a car. E bikes probably even have more to do with it than environmentalism does.
The Internet replacing the need to go places (e.g. chatting on social media vs. hanging out in a dead mall) probably helped too.
You also have ride hail services that weren’t available a generation ago. You can get places in a car without owning a car.
True enough. Cruisin, video gaming on split screen, and malls got replaced by social media and online gaming with voicechat.
Lucky to get a hand-me-down as well.
Hmm
Gotta package wealth disparity as a feel-good environmentalist story :)
Years ago when my Gen Z nephew was turning 16 (minimum driving age in USA), the conversation went like this:
- “Are you excited to start driving and do you want car?”
- “Nah, not interested”
- “Why not?”
- “Where would I go?”
- “Wherever you want!”
- “Everything I want is right here at home”
I thought about my own Gen X early driving experience with the freedom to go to the mall or the movie theater whenever I wanted and to drive to school or work.
- His school (and eventually job) were both within walking bicycling distance.
- He had streaming services I never dreamed of when I was his age piping a flood of big budget movies right to his TV whenever he wants
- malls are dead
I couldn’t really argue with his logic. Years later he did get a car when he moved out and lived farther away from work. However, it was many years after the minimum driving age which was a big departure from generations prior.
For me the appeal of a car was having somewhere private to do drugs, awkwardly make out with girls, and hide from my parents.
I feel like those things are somewhat timeless?
All of those things can and always have been accomplished without the use of a car.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t make it easier, or make sure that when your friends are smoking you are there getting free hits and your gas money. Between the free beer, weed, and gas my shit box might have paid for itself.
Parents force their kids to share their location, so it isn’t like the kids can hide as they used to.
I’m so glad I grew up when the internet was only used by nerds like me…
Even as someone who didn’t try any drugs until I was 20, I fully agree with you. But also gals and bois for me.
My son is about to turn 18 and is of much the same mind. We pushed him a bit to get his license but he rarely drives and has about zero interest in owning his own car. He just doesn’t have anywhere he needs/wants to go. I imagine it’s a little different for kids with more activities outside the home. Sports, clubs, jobs… He doesn’t have any of that going on at this point. I’m admittedly a little sad about that, but I can’t really force him to be interested.
Part of it comes down to that we killed a lot of the other places to go and do things along the way (called Third Places - not home or work, but a secret third thing). Kids don’t have malls or something to hang out at anymore. If they’re not hanging out online, then they’re probably at somebody’s house. It costs money to be anywhere else. Plus, gas and cars are expensive. So there’s no desire to just go out driving for the fun of it. Instead of being an expression of personal freedom, cars are just about getting you from point A to point B. When I turned 16 almost 20 years ago, this was how I and the older sister of a friend of mine felt, too. There was nowhere to go really in a vacation town where traffic is so bad in the summer that you don’t want to drive and everything is closed the rest of the year. So a car was just a way to get to school/work and back home again.
“Gen-z is choosing to be homeless.”
These crazy kids are forgoing the tradition of having a roof over ones head in favor of urban camping. It definitely has nothing to do the kleptocracy that made housing unaffordable by converting it into a speculative market for Wall Street and foreign nationals to park dirty money.
I am reading the article to say “even living out of your car is an unobtainable dream for man Gen Z.” When combined with the headline I saw recently about the return of company owned housing, the world is looking pretty bleak. We should expect unions to be making a comeback, but many seem to be brainwashed against them.
Don’t forget insurance, either. A new driver will pay sky-high rates for the first few years. And while one can technically have a license but not pay for insurance if they don’t own a car, if they ever do get a car insurance may end up even higher, since they dont have a history of good driving under insurance while their peers do.
My kids insurance for full coverage when they got their license was $35/month.
In the article they noted this was the same for millennials and gen x before them. I’m going to assume the standard for youths purchasing cars was with the baby boomer generation. I know my dad told me when he was young, you would purchase a cool car that didn’t work for the equivalent of $100 dollars, get a friend to tow it home, then work on it for a few weeks to get it running. He told me how much he missed his MG Midget, which let’s recognize as a cool ass car for a kid to have. He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars*. All his friends would be doing the same.
Nowadays it would be a $1k junker, and you’d need to have a computer science degree to fix the onboard computer while having all the specific tools to get into their proprietary parts. There are older cars too, but the standard of fixing a car has increased, all the while each generation has less time and money to do it.
- This was a typo, but I love this typo. You say deck of cards, I say deck of cars, Thank you @otp@sh.itjust.works !
_He could fix that car with a wrench, a stick of butter, and a deck of cars.
Well yeah, having a whole deck of other cars would make it pretty simple!
I’m a millennial, but I fucking hate driving and gave it up a while ago. My eyesight is really bad due to misformed corneas so I have trauma from being forced to drive at a younger age. I eventually moved to a major city and got rid of my car the first chance I could (fun fact, leases are scams!). I love being able to walk/take public transit anywhere I want now, but unfortunately leaving the city is incredibly hard.
Fuck cars.
Well how the fuck are they supposed to drive when car payment at 500+, gas is 3+ a gallon and car insurance is 1500 per premium! Not to mention potential repairs.
I make 80k a year and I can barely afford my car!
These articles are so bad. There is no actual research behind them. It’s all “it could be this”…well fucking dig into that maybe and get back to us with actual journalism.
Not to mention it’s all based on ba consulting firm findings. It’s McKinsey so they probably just want to lay people off and are using this research to support that recommendation.
Millennial chiming in. Donated my car to the humane society a couple years ago. Thankfully I live close enough to walk to work, have plenty of amenities near by, and a bus line a block away when it runs. I’ve saved so much money about it. If I need a car for a couple of days I rent and it’s still less than owning. Do not regret it at all.
Every now and then I think about buying a used car and the prices are absurd on top of all the maintenance, insurance, registration.
Ah, so it’s not just my kids (I’m Gen X). Neither has expressed any interest in driving. One’s a starving student, so I guess there’s that. But the other’s graduated and scored a cushy job where he could certainly afford wheels if he wanted. I asked him about it and he’s like nah. I’ll just take a lyft or whatever if I need it. And he’s a software dev so he spends the time on his laptop. I guess if he were driving, his time would be less productive? I dunno.
We actually went to the same tech convention last fall in Denver and shared a hotel. I knee-jerk rented a car thinking Denver sounds like a driving town. But parking at the convention was exorbitant and we wound up ride-sharing there anyway, so I am beginning to see the merit in his way of thinking? The only time we got any use out of the rental was the last day when we had a little free time before the flight and drove up to Red Rocks. But seriously, for that one trip, the rental was hardly worth it.
Gen z earns like $15/hr.
Driving is so dangerous that I can’t even believe that it’s this easy to get a license from the first place.
I can’t drive because I’m visually impaired. I know I’m too visually impaired to drive because I can’t even grocery shop properly with my shit eyesight - with a basket, let alone pushing a trolley!
But I pass the eye exams they make you take before you get a license and ive double checked with my optometrist and yes, my vision score is within the legal limits to drive as long as I wear my glasses… It’s baffling, because I absolutely should not be driving! I can’t see shit!
So I don’t drive.
When I say “I’m too blind to drive” some people ask if I can just lie about my vision and fake my way through, because “you really need a licence” and when I explain I can legally get a licence I just don’t, for everyone’s safety, they act like I’m being a selfish child for not doing the adult thing and getting my licence. Just because it can doesn’t mean I should.
I do cycle, pedalling a 20kg frame of metal at 15km/h on a bike path feels a lot safer than driving a 1 tonne hunk of metal at 80km/h on a highway. Without my bike I’d be pretty fucked in terms of my independence and being able to do what needs to be done as an adult. Fortunately my vision isn’t degenerative.
But in the last 5 years, especially since 2020 covid locksdowns, I feel like there are more people on the road that shouldn’t be. There’s just a huge increase in the frequency of “silly mistakes” - people swerving into the bike lane without looking to avoid a speed bump, people running a red turn signal because they’re looking at the green straight signal, people merging lanes at dangerously low speeds, no one putting their headlights on in the rain, everyone forgetting to indicate, people stopping more abruptly instead of slowing and anticipating a stop sign, and my personal favourite, everyone cutting corners in residential areas like they’re a formula 1 driver, just turning into the oncoming traffic of the street they’re turning into.
Obligatory fuck McKinsey.
Those scooters are pretty cool though. If you told 10 year old me there would be electric scooters just sitting around on the street in the future you could just scan and ride, I’d have called you a big fibber.
Sometimes my dog gets a surprise run, while I just get to ride a scooter.
Gen Z can’t afford £3k a year on insurance.
Millennials can’t afford 3k a year on insurance.
