Then you want to be able to also take their friends…
If you are young and hip and wonder why some aspect of the suburbs or transport is so absurdly oversized or badly designed, the answer is probably kids and you are not seeing it because you don’t have kids.
Well yeah sure... that's why we completely fucked up the world in less than 100 years. It doesn't really qualify as an answer though.
Plenty of places, and times, where people had kids and no cars, you only """need""" a car now because we built everything around them.
You might be interested in the Suzuki Mirage as well.
If you are stressed about reliability, don't worry. You need to do regular maintenance (oils, fluids, filters, tires) and you'll stay on the road longer than brand new cars. I had a Chevrolet Aveo that had the radiator blow up while leaving the dealer!
edit: add clarifying word
Or rich enough to live in walkable neighborhoods.
Changing this would be very challenging because we have also decided that real estate should be an investment. This means it should always go up, which orients urban planning toward making housing unaffordable. The primary role of the car is driving further away to escape rent extraction, which is sharply at odds with making cities walkable.
The only way to have a walkable city that is affordable is to get those crime rates up. Maybe that’s what SF is trying to do. But even that doesn’t work if you have people like OpenAI locating there and making people work in the office and paying $300k+ entry level.
Though violent crime is dropping over time, there was a resurgence following COVID. I couldn't find any statistics on whether that is sustained or has since started to decline.