Don’t Expect Car Ownership to Become Obsolete
Data show millennials aren’t really less interested in owning vehicles than previous generations were.
Life after cars? Not anytime soon.
Photographer: Richard Bouhet/AFP, via Getty Images
It’s quite likely that carmakers and officials who regulate them are laboring under an important misconception. Car ownership isn’t really receding into the past, and the available evidence that today’s young people aren’t interested in owning cars has more to do with bygone economic troubles than with changing preferences.
The evidence began emerging a few years ago; in 2013, the New York Times trumpeted “The End of Car Culture” based on downward trends in car ownership rates and miles driven in the U.S. The number of young drivers appeared to be sliding, and this was blamed, in one news story after another, on millennials’ supposed preference for renting and sharing over owning.