Kids Don’t Care About Cars | Hacker News Reader

Kids Don’t Care About Cars

lefsetz.com

47 pointsyesimahuman66 comments

Be careful not to extrapolate future trends too much based on what "kids these days" are doing right now. Cars are tools, and when the only task you have to complete is "get to school or work, get home, occasionally get to your girlfriend's place" a car that gets you from A to B without much trouble is fine. But a lot of "kids these days" will eventually grow into parents, and they'll have different use cases and therefore need more versatile tools. A 2-seater no longer works when you have 3 kids, or when you have to haul things bigger than a person for work or your own projects. A simple city-commute-optimized car with a short range no longer works when you occasionally want to visit your parents 2 states over, your brother 3 states over, and your wife's parents in a small town that's inconveniently far from any airport. When "kids these days" grow up, they may discover use cases they'd never considered before.

How often do you visit your parents 2 states over, or your parents-in-law who live far away from any airport?

Sure, "kids these days" will soon grow up and figure out what they need to get to those places. But the answer might not be "Buy a minivan." It could just as well be "Use this app to rent a self-driving minivan."

Having 3 kids, of course, is a different problem, but a lot of it depends on where you live. I have a hunch that many "kids these days" would hate to live in the same boring suburbs that their parents raised them in. And who knows, maybe Americans will finally rediscover the courage to tell their kids to take the subway to soccer.

my parents are nearby, but my wife's parents are about 500 miles away, and we visit several times per year. We'd like to visit more often, but have also had multiple funerals this year that have taken us in the other direction.

I'm not suggesting everyone will necessarily own a car. Only that extrapolating from the trends of what young people are currently doing isn't necessarily accurate -- recently graduated singles won't have all of the same life considerations as they will 5-10 years in the future. (Another one: those "boring suburbs" often have much better schools than the "hip" inner city. When you have kids, bad schools become a serious consideration.)

I've been pretty happy with swapping driving, insurance, parking, maintenance etc. for living right in the middle of the city very close to work and using Lyft for everything else. Actually saves me a ton of time/money. For just the cost of a parking spot in SF (~$300) I can get a good 40 lyft rides a month to most of the locations I need to access.

What if you want to go for a weekend camping in Yosemite, or drive down the coastal highway to LA, or maybe up to Portland and Seattle? I agree owning and keeping a car in the middle of a city is expensive and tough. There are certainly some benefits to having a car though.

My fiance and I live in San Francisco; neither one of us owns a car. On the occasions that we need a car for a couple of hours (e.g., large purchases) we use City Car Share. For trips out of the City, we just rent a car. We save thousands of dollars a year in gas, insurance and maintenance. We also save time and aggravation in not having to worry about things like parking and street cleaning. We can't see ever going back to owning a car.

I did the same thing. It was basically break even for weekend trips and more profitable to have the car for week long trips. If you like the woods and places off the beaten path car shares aren't going to work.

Rent a car? If you divide the cost of car owning by the average number of such drives, you will get a sum that can send you to Antarctica and back several times.

Maybe for the city-bound.

Also, rentals typically have a per-mile cost, no? So distance is also important, as well as frequency.

IIRC it depends on the company. Zipcar doesn't care about miles, but I think CityCarShare does.

Oh?

Up to 180 miles included per day; additional miles from $0.45

http://www.zipcar.com/nyc/check-rates

Hooray, $750 in additional miles fees to visit my parents.

As I said, don't quite recall what those fees are, generally haven't affected me because I don''t have to travel over 180 miles very frequently. If I do, I generally get on a bus or on a plane, but I can see how someone else's use case would be vastly different.

How many times per a car lifetime are you visiting your parents? Perhaps these $750/trip would be more economical if you don't drive much.

Also, I am curious, why don't you take a plane for such a long trip?

I currently do take a plane, but how about when you have a spouse & kids? That's 4.5 airfares for the average family. Have you ever noticed your co-workers who have kids, very rarely fly places?

4.5 airfares to visit family would run me ~$1400.

Families seems to be the biggest absence in the echo chamber that has built up around car-free lifestyle. Families don't have to have a car- but it doesn't seem like worrying about more than just one person (themselves) has even crossed the mind of many of the car-free advocates I have read.

Most regular rentals in the US (Hertz, Avis, Dollar, Thrifty, etc.) are fixed-price daily rate, and generally <$50/day.

You rent a car. It's much cheaper to rent a car occasionally than to own a car.

Renting a car for a long trip is almost always more cost effective, if you plan to drive the max every day, due to maintenance/depreciation. Highway miles are relatively soft miles, but they still add up.

I wrote a similar post two years ago: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/03/24/cars-and-generation... and have noticed the same basic trends. I'd also note that this:

As for the freedom the automobile once represented…

You don’t have to leave your house to connect with your friends, you don’t have go to the mall, as for doing illicit things…sexting is more outre and volatile than anything baby boomers could ever cook up.

May have been done in by traffic, too. Many of the people I know associate cars with traffic and wasted time.

Many of the people I know associate cars with traffic and wasted time.

Won't self driving cars change that, though? I've also heard that a side effect of constant Oculus use, is that one becomes far less sensitive to motion sickness. These two things might combine to lessen the time wastage in cars.

For what truth there is to this, I wonder if it's partly a class thing too. For people middle-class and above, myself included, I get the sense that cars are something that was always present in abundance, and therefore no big deal. We're more sensitive to noticing the annoying things about them, like parking, worrying about driving drunk, traffic jams, etc, and perhaps take for granted the freedom in having your own car.

People in lower classes, at least that I have interacted with, tend to see a car as more of a status symbol, since they're not so readily available at their income levels. As in, their family may have one, but they don't just automatically get their kids a car when they turn 16. And so they're more of a status symbol, and people tend to more glamorize the freedom of it while ignoring the headaches as trivial.

In many ways cars are also more useful to people who are poor. You're more likely to work in some out of the way place without good transport links rather than an office in the big city and taking taxis can get expensive.

If you look at jobs in construction "must have own transport to get to the job site" is often listed as a requirement, less so for programming jobs.

Poorer people are more likely to holiday by packing their family into the car and driving somewhere rather than getting an international flight. They can also be used to transport stuff around when moving etc.

In short cars provide a great deal of flexibility and utility for the cost.

I have problem opening the link... so out of mere speculation what it is discussing, but of all things, I don't appreciate that it is so much hassle having a car. I wouldn't own a car if I had a choice. I almost feel like that the lifecycle of owning car is designed to induce pain at every single step -- buying, maintaining, selling, etc.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Thanks, doesn't sound too far off from what I thought it would be.

I don't know the statistics, but car culture is definitely not dead in the younger generation. Just look at the enthusiast forums for any make of car and you'll see thousands of young people talking about modifying, enjoying, driving, and racing cars.

Modern cars aren't as easy to upgrade and modify for the hobbyist, but they're still doing it.

On quibble: I don't foresee the market for luxury and sports cards drying up any time soon (as the author suggests). A status symbol is still a status symbol: the main value proposition of an expensive car is to be expensive [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good

Yes. This has been my experience at all whenever my younger relatives (ages 10-20) see a nice (to them defined as Tesla or European and fast, it seems) car.

Kids still like toys, even with smartphones and the internet. And they'll most likely grow into adults who still like toys.

Car ownership patterns will probably change (students living on campuses and young professionals will probably have much less need for a personally owned car in the next decade or so), but there's two pretty big car markets that won't be threatened by that: luxury status symbol cars, and utilitarian people/stuff-movers. Uber and all the "fleet of centrally owned self-driving cars" talk is useless to someone who needs to keep a stash of items for their kids in their car, and needs space for their kids' friends, and needs that vehicle several times a day for family/commuting purposes (I don't think UberMinivan would really take off...). Owning won't be practically replaced by renting for every use case, and there's a lot of use cases for personal vehicles out there that fall outside of the typical HN perspective.

The main value proposition of an expensive car is to impress people in that expensiveness. So what happens if nobody gives a shit?

I can certainly anecdotally confirm this. The only reason I'm even in the process of getting my license is because my parents want me to, and many of my peers are similar in that regard. Additionally, when my dad got a new car recently, I was not excited due to its beauty or power, but because of its convenience, energy efficiency, and price (he got a Spark EV).

Add this to self-driving cars coming soon, and cars are definitely looking more and more like a utility.

Interesting to hear. My son (17) and all his friends are quite interested in cars, watch Top Gear, talk about cars, etc. The one difference I have noted between he and I is that he is not really interested in how cars work or how to maintain/repair them. I on the other hand do all the basic maintenance myself and mostly enjoy doing it.

It might be an urban/rural thing as well.

Edit: I also think practical self-driving cars as well as EVs are a lot farther off than you seem to. I've just seen in the automotive world too many stories about amazing technologies that are "just around the corner" but never seem to materialize.

I also think practical self-driving cars as well as EVs are a lot farther off than you seem to.

For heaven's sake: don't get your information about EVs from Top Gear. I love watching those guys, but they really are a bunch of clowns, and the show's just pure entertainment. The Tesla S model with the 260 mile range is a perfectly reasonable (though pricey) car for getting around the Bay Area.

Also, I've heard that if you lease a Fiat 500e, you get some long distance car rentals as part of your lease. (100 mile range is too short, though.)

The Tesla S model with the 260 mile range is a perfectly reasonable (though pricey) car for getting around the Bay Area.

That's like saying a private jet is a perfectly reasonable (though pricey) airplane for making flights.

I'm sorry my pockets are not gilded like some of the folk around here, but a Tesla is way too goddamn expensive for us normal folk.

The plug-in hybrids are a great alternative. Chevy Volt, Toyota Prius, Ford Fusion, and more. All have some electric range (38/11/19 miles respectively) and then have gas engines that extend the range to "normal" ICE car ranges.

We just bought a volt and it's a great car. We've driven 168 miles since we got it and have driven 0 gas miles. And with the $7500 federal tax credit and $1500 california rebate the cost is only $25,000.

That's like saying a private jet is a perfectly reasonable (though pricey) airplane for making flights.

Your analogy is off by a few orders of magnitude.

It's exaggerated to make a point to people who consider a Tesla affordable.

My house cost less than two Teslas.

It's exaggerated to make a point to people who consider a Tesla affordable.

A Tesla is in the same price range as a lot of conventional luxury cars. To me, that's a good first step. I didn't say to stop there.

It's probably a case of selection bias as well :) Most of my friends are the nerdy programmer types, so perhaps it's natural that we're not interested much in cars (although I feel that sentiment among my not-so-geeky friends as well).

I do have to object to your statement that EVs aren't practical yet; while I admit that they probably aren't great for urban environments, my dad has loved his Spark EV, and it's hard to beat the price after rebates. (To be fair, we also have a gas-powered car for longer trips, but it's rarely ever used for drives that the EV couldn't handle, and in those situations a rental might be more economical, anyway.)

In my opinion, the market for the auto industry is divided into two major groups, there's the group that views cars as a means to an end whether this end is an upgrade in status or getting from point A to B, and the group that actually likes to drive and buys cars for the pleasure of it.

I think even in the younger generation this division exists. Granted the latter group is a minority but it accounts for(or will account for when they can afford to) sales in the sports car sector and activity in the tuning sector.

But is this such a change from past? The words in the adverts may have changed from freedom to self driving and electric but has the landscape really changed? I don't think so. There's always a market segment that looks at what cars bring and not the cars themselves. It's up to the auto industry to figure out how to meet today's needs.

Personally though i will still line up for that Aston Martin, i am the other kind.

I think the trends the author is seeing may only be regional. Out here in Oklahoma and on some of my trips around the midwest, every little kid who sees my car knows the difference between a new base model Mustang and a Mustang GT and gets excited to hear a real 420HP V8. Lots of young guys I've met -- in college, through friends, in the military, etc. -- have also had their share of fast cars or tuners. A good number have even done a restoration or two.

As for the women, plenty of college girls and other young women notice what I'm driving and give me complements. A nice car definitely still gets attention from the ladies. Quite a few I've know even enjoy driving stick and like to go pretty fast.

I'll admit, young people may be more practical and economical with their vehicle purchase decisions, but car culture is still very alive and strong here.

16 year old here, I've got a few thoughts on this from being in the middle of it. Background: I live in a moderately sized urban center (Austin).

First, some anecdotal data: roughly half my friends have no plans to even get a license before they're 18, many of the rest (including myself) regularly borrow a parent's car, a smaller sub-set have parents who bought them cars, and a couple have bought cars with earned money.

> Yup, the road trip is as dead as the western

This is plainly wrong. Myself, and most of my friends grew up going on road trips with parents and now we're starting to take them ourselves.

> To the younger generation cars are transportation, nothing more. They take you from a to b.

This is 100% on-point. They're a convenient tool, and not much more. Granted, we still appreciate a Porsche, but we don't fantasize about them in the way I think previous generations did. They still represent some freedom, because they provide a space that's not controlled by authority figures in our lives, along with mobility. But we feel no need to own that car, it can just as easily be a parent's.

> So long Ferrari. So long Aston Martin.

I'm not sure this is true. My friends and I occasionally talk about, and appreciate things like the Model S, McLarens, and Ferraris. I don't doubt that several of my friends would buy them as successful adults. But given the choice of a nice apartment in NYC or SF or the nice car, almost all of us would take the better living location.

My job is three miles away, and my other work is all remote. Enough of my friends have cars, or access to family cars, that for any social outing someone can get access to a car. So buying a car doesn't provide much value to me. It's expensive, stressful, and any car a teenager can afford is mediocre at best. So instead of buying a car, I'm spending time in Europe with my two best friends next summer.

Cars are still viewed as a nice thing to have, but to us they're not worth working for months and months to buy. Driving is still very much a thing that many teenagers are interested in.

> Driving is still very much a thing that many teenagers are interested in.

> Myself, and most of my friends grew up going on road trips with parents and now we're starting to take them ourselves.

> we feel no need to own that car, it can just as easily be a parent's.

> buying a car doesn't provide much value to me

I must say that many adults (older than you, but younger than the boomers) feel exactly the same. Driving is fun. Traveling is fun. No amount of web browsing and online social networking can replace the actual, physical experience of traveling and seeing the country for yourself. Moreover, there are so many cool places in America that you can only get to by driving. So the road trip is definitely alive and well.

And yet, many people in their 30s and 40s have chosen to forgo car ownership. Because they aren't going on road trips all time. They rent a vehicle when they need one, or maybe lease a car for a while. This is the grown-up equivalent of borrowing your parent's car, and it comes with all the same benefits, too: renting can be less expensive, less stressful, and lower maintenance than full ownership, even if you rent a car every single weekend. (A rental location near my University used to have a special where you could rent a mid-size car for three weekends for less than $200.)

tl;dr: Cars are still cool. Car ownership isn't.

I'm also 16. To be completely honest, the only reason I haven't got my license is due to laziness, but living in Denver, my needs are served by Uber, Lyft, and public transportation (buses/lite rail). Many would say that it would be cheaper in the long run to just buy a car, but personally there isn't much of an ROI for me.

I don't know how it is in the US but in the UK, it was a real struggle to afford a car, luckily this year, my insurance dropped to a reasonable £800, compared to the £3000 I was being quoted for last year.

You can get your driving licence when you're 17, but at that point, (usually) you aren't earning enough money to drive a car.

So you're sitting on your license for 4 years, and when the insurers finally believe you can drive without crashing, you better be sure you remember everything you were taught 4 year ago.

I don't think it's cars that are going out of fashion, insurers are pricing 'kids' out of the driving seat.

My anecdotal experience varies from the author's. Having taken up driving for Uber and Lyft for the past 6 weeks in Los Angeles, to earn some side cash, I can say I receive a lot of compliments about my car, and mostly from women in their 20's. I'm driving a 2010 Jetta Sportwagen TDI. I think the moon roof has a lot to do with it.

No need for status symbols anymore. If you want people to know you are rich, just post it on Facebook.

"All the young girls you want to impress will be laughing at you, you wasted all your money on WHAT?"

Actually, they DO notice the nice car. Not that it is super helpful, but still...

Haha. A good laugh of a post. I did not care one bit about many things when I was 15. Yet your tastes and interests change as you get older. Why people dont realize that?

I certainly view a car as a tool, nothing more, but I don't know why this author presumes to talk for all people under forty.

It's also a weird screed against cars as if they have no utility. I guess this person has never lived outside a big city in the suburbs or country where having a car is absolutely a necessity to get to work, the store, etc.

You have to be careful not to extrapolate too much from your personal experiences. I screw that up pretty often.

Near as I can tell, there are about as many kids that are into cars as ever have been. They're maybe doing different things to them than in the past -- wheels, suspension, hydraulics, stereos -- but there are still a lot of young people that care a lot about their cars. Forums like stancenation (http://www.stancenation.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?30-Meets...) seem to be mostly younger people. Not my thing, but hey, a lot of folks into it.

And near as I can tell, it's never been true that everyone knew how to work on a car. Mechanics have been around forever, and for good reason. One of my grandpa's favorite stories is the time he took apart the engine on his car, down to the bolt, carefully boxing and bagging and labeling every single thing, only to find he had no idea how it all went back together again. The mechanic showed up, took one look at it, threw it all into a box and brought the car back a few days later.

The 50's style family road trip has maybe suffered somewhat from the high price of gas and from the competition of touring abroad, but people still do road trips. My pa and I drove from Florida to California years ago; I just finished a brief tour of small towns in Oregon and California a few months ago, and bumped into someone else doing the same; lots of people take road trips to Burning Man every year; I still see the occasional converted hippy bus on the road; and there's even a company that specializes in renting RVs to people for trips, https://www.cruiseamerica.com/ -- if you stop at a KOA or a Goodsam, you'll find plenty of those. If you don't travel much, it's easy to believe other people don't travel too, and if you travel, you'll meet other travelers.

Sure, some things are changing. Something always is. But just 'cause people can do the Facebook thing doesn't mean it's as fun as a LAN party or a game night or beer and barbecue with friends. I'm pretty sure the party scene isn't any less lively than before.

Jeep is still doing a brisk business domestically (http://www.autonews.com/article/20140701/RETAIL01/140709987/...), and the main thing those vehicles have going for them is their brand identity. (Don't hate me, I love Jeeps ... but they're not really practical for the average use case.)

It is not the sixties once again.

More on this topic: http://fortune.com/2013/11/21/inside-the-mind-of-marc-andree...

"Ask kids if they’d rather have a smartphone or a car if they had to pick and 100% would say smartphones. Because smartphones represent freedom."

Talk about assuming the premise...

100% might say smartphones, because a car requires freedom of movement to deploy. They can still use their smartphone in their bedrooms, so of course a child -- whose movements are highly regulated by their guardians -- are going to choose the item they get the most utility out of.

Smartphones represent communication. Andreessen would do well to investigate the difference between comms and liberty.

A smart kid would realize that with a car he could have a job and then buy his own smartphone.

An even smarter kid, realizes already that for cash flow, you don't really have to leave the house. Smartphone (and iPad or PC) wins again.

Someone smarter than that would get the car and sell it for way more than it costs to buy a smartphone.

47% of the population of San Francisco uses something other than a car to get to work. In big cities, a car is not needed to get a well paying job. The really smart kids realize this.

'kids today'[1] have quite a lot of representation outside the concentrated city centre - usually city centres have a higher-than-average age. Cool, SF is tiny, compact, and riddled with public transport. Now travel down the coast a bit to greater LA, 20 million people of which have poor access to public transport and live in a very spread out city, limiting the utility of getting around via musclepower. Rinse, repeat anywhere you have spread-out suburbia with poor PT, or outside cities altogether..

[1] article's chosen demographic, though it doesn't really matter

Employed 16 year old here who has intentionally chosen not to buy a car. My job is three miles away, it's healthier to walk, and my other work is all remote. I'm using the money I could have spent buying/maintaining a car to travel Europe with my two best friends next summer.

Employment doesn't require a car, even for teens.

My sisters kid was given this choice around 5 years ago. He would instantly stop talking if you were in a conversation and shift all his attention to the phone if it buzzes. My sister said car or phone. It was clear that he couldn't be trusted with a phone in a car.

He picked the phone and still doesn't drive or have his license. (Portland, OR)

The article is rehashing the same tired old Y/millenials vs Boomers crap again. There's a lot more individuality amongst all the generations than articles like this give credit for.

I agree kids don't care about cars right now. They care about getting a job, which it's been harder for many of these Gen-R (recession) kids.

Eh, I didn't care about cars until I was in my 20s, but before then I wasn't in the market for expensive cars anyway. Kids not being into cars is not the end of the world.

Yea, wait until they get a job and have to figure out how to get to work. Then (assuming they live in 99% of the USA), all of a sudden, having a car is going to be pretty important. I wouldn't draw any conclusions if kids under 20 don't care about cars. Like E-mail, they'll suddenly start using it as soon as they get their first job.

50% of the US population lives in big urban areas. In those places it is not all necessary to own a car to get to and from work. Indeed, in places like San Francisco, New York and Boston, owning a car can be more hassle then help.

But will they care about them? The article acknowledges the utility aspect, but that doesn't mean they will form an emotional bond with it, as previous generations have. If so, then it will be a difficult future for the automakers who play on that aspect.

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