You can't generalize this to all Americans, as it largely seems to be localized to the Baby Boomer generation, who were responsible for roughly 2/3rds of automobile sales in 2011. There's an Autoweek article[1] that tries to spin this positively, but it basically says that Millennials and Gen-Z are responsible for just 30% of vehicle sales in 2017. Essentially, people ages 18-35 are purchasing less than a third of the vehicles, despite being at a position in their lives where a demand should be at its highest.
Complicating matters, it looks like the market research pointing to millennials essentially purchasing them merely out of pragmatic necessity, to drive to work or cart families around because there are no other options: Makes sense, because that's how the Baby Boomers shaped most of our metro areas. They're less car "owners" and more car hostages. As boomers die off, their economic and political power will wane and we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes to urban and suburban landscapes.
[1] https://autoweek.com/article/car-news/bucking-trends-milleni...