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.