SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Auto manufacturers today are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why the millennial generation has little-to-no interest in owning a car. What car makers are failing to see is that this generation's interests and priorities have been redefined in the last two decades, pushing cars to the side while must-have personal technology products take up the fast lane.
It's no secret the percentage of new vehicles sold to 18- to 34-year-olds has significantly dropped over the past few years. Many argue this is the result of a weak economy, that the idea of making a large car investment and getting into more debt on top of college loans is too daunting for them. But that's not the "driving" factor, especially considering that owning a smartphone or other mobile device, with its monthly fees of network access, data plan, insurance, and app services, is almost comparable to the monthly payments required when leasing a Honda Civic.
...
With recent studies showing a huge decline in auto sales among the millennial marketplace, it's no wonder auto manufacturers are in a mild state of panic, realizing they're missing out on a generation that wields $200 billion in purchasing power. Numbers don't lie, and over the last few years statistics have shown a significant drop in young people who own cars, as well as those with driver's licenses—and that decline continues among the youngest millennials, meaning this is not a trend that's going away anytime soon. From 2007 to 2011, the number of cars purchased by people aged 18 to 34, fell almost 30%, and according to a study from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, only 44% of teens obtain a driver's license within the first year of becoming eligible and just half, 54% are licensed before turning 18. This is a major break with the past, considering how most teens of the two previous generations would race to the DMV for their license or permit on the day of their 16th birthday.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by julian on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:14AM
Exactly this.
I'd love to own a car. Most of the people I know in my situation and age would love a car. We can't afford it. We can't afford it because the baby boomers who are now scratching their heads privatized everything, replaced fully-funded education with student loans, outsourced professional careers or replaced them with internships and H1Bs, crashed the economy, reverse-mortgaged their homes so we won't even inherit those, and then have the stones to blame us for all this.
Fuck them. I'm never buying a new car now *out of spite*.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:50AM
The baby boomers privatised everything? Except for the things that they kinda-sorta didn't really privatise. Such as, say, Amtrak. And ports. And the mortgage boosting agencies. And all those industries that started out private, but have been heavily regulated to the point of being another arm of the government.
They replaced fully funded education with student loans. Except that they established a deep and rich set of grants, bursaries, scholarships and tax breaks to the point that, if you're going broke with student loans and you're not taking one of the several ways to get them forgiven (the exact list depending on your field of study) that's kind of on you.
Outsourced professional careers. Oh, and created entire new fields of work that didn't even exist when they were born. There are more people working in the USA now than even existed in the country in 1945, and they don't all work for Walbucks and Starmart.
Crashed the economy - that is better and stronger now even after an anaemic excuse for a recovery than it was when Generation X hit the labour market.
Reverse-mortgaged their homes because the Greatest Generation's dream of a social safety net turns out to have been a ponzi scheme.
I'm not even a boomer, and even I can tell you're full of a festering blend of bullshit and poorly directed rage.
Tone down the rage, study the environment, and figure out what to do to fix it, not blame other people for (at best) half-true fairytales of political self-righteousness.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:16AM
At this point the Millennial's tales of woe are reaching such extravagant proportions, they really should be called Generation Dave.
As a point of reference, my mother had to navigate a minefield in order to go to school. I had to nurse her nervous breakdowns before I could start on my own career.
Your lives aren't that terribly bad.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @05:25AM
Tone down the rage, study the environment, and figure out what to do to fix it, not blame other people for (at best) half-true fairytales of political self-righteousness.
I think that there are plenty of reasons to be completely furious these days. For fuck's sake, millennials are growing up in a time when there is genuine concern for the future well being of the entire planet's eco systems. Humanity itself may not survive for too much longer. That prospect alone would be enough to burst a millennial's vein in a fit of outrage.
And there is no denying that over the last 30 years or so a perfect storm of privatisation has raged through the democratised neo-liberal nation states. And that has had consequences. Some good, a lot of it not so good.
We have a stronger economy now? Yes, very strong if you are one of the people on top. THAT should be plenty obvious by now. And is that the same strong economy that could burst any time now? The one that is pretty much completely fucked under the surface? That economy with the nice and shiny veneer that deludes most of us? The one that is almost completely unsustainable and will drive us all straight off the edge of the cliff? That economy?
Wake the fuck up dude!
I just wish millennials would rid themselves of their social media addictions and actually do something that doesn't involve some variation of "mirror mirror, on the wall, who has the most likes of them all".
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:52PM
Some have. Six of the leaders of the "Umbrella revolution" which disrupted central Hong Kong for months a couple years ago, were just elected to the territory's legislature. They're all in their 20s or 30s.
This means two things:
1) millennials "actually [did] something" by running for power
2) millennials flocked out in huge numbers to vote them in
All the more impressive because this is in the shadow of authoritarian China, which has shown lip service to true democracy in Hong Kong (not that the former British rulers did any better until just before their 100-year lease expired).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/election-of-hong-kong-activists-means-clashes-ahead-with-beijing-1.3751652 [www.cbc.ca]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @05:28AM
They replaced fully funded education with student loans. Except that they established a deep and rich set of grants, bursaries, scholarships and tax breaks to the point that, if you're going broke with student loans and you're not taking one of the several ways to get them forgiven (the exact list depending on your field of study) that's kind of on you.
What a bullshit, squishy, generic defense. That "deep rich set of grants, etc" does not even approach the nearly free education available to all before the 80s. If it did, then student loan debt wouldn't be well over a trillion dollars. [marketwatch.com] No, millennials are not so universally stupid that they all can't figure out these unnamed ways to discharge their debt. Student loans were financialized in order to make wallstreet billions of dollars at the expense of those least able to carry the load. Your apologia is self-righteous sanctimonious bullshit. Fuck you.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:47PM
Indeed, I wonder who this AC could be and where he might work, and how old he could be to still be drinking that KoolAid. Certainly he could not work in tech, because anyone who has worked in tech longer than 6 months knows how true to life Dilbert is. Or he could be a millenial who won the job lottery and got something working in finance, and is fresh off all the summer parties in the Hamptons that banks throw for their new analysts, and he's thinking boy this is great I sure am the best-and-brightest that EVAR WAZ, but has not yet felt the knives of his colleagues in his back (an occupational hazard in finance) nor truly plumbed how deeply stupid his superiors are.
But it is a vanishingly rare animal in 21st century America who yet spouts the Pollyanna platitudes this one has.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @08:51PM
This.
You can get some grants. Sure! How about 80% of your tuition? Wow! Amazing! Sounds great!
Except that books, food, bus fare or gas, and rent aren't covered by those grants, very often.
Except that the 20% uncovered by grants in this example exceeds the full amount of tuition in the early '00s - let alone the 80s.
Except that getting post-secondary now is like getting high school in the 90s, and good luck finding scholarships if you're at the bottom of the acceptance list. Maybe a bursary or grant or two. No full coverage unless you have a family with links to a school/union/company that *happens* to have a program that not enough others apply to, to squish you out.
Source: went to uni almost 20 years ago and again now. Undergrad tuition is > now 6x what I first paid and (and is climbing year on year at my institution).
(Score: 1) by Sarasani on Wednesday September 14 2016, @07:50AM
...and they don't all work for Walbucks and Starmart.
Indeed, some of the children (!) of millennials in the USA don't work for Walbucks and Starmart (or go to school) because they're too busy trading sex for food [theguardian.com] to feed themselves or their younger siblings.
And this is happening in the world's wealthiest country. What an utter disgrace!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:50PM
They just didn't work or study hard enough, and did not wear anywhere near the sufficient amount of flair [youtube.com]. Hey, some of them even have as many as three or four jobs!! Isn't that incredible, that a young person can have that many opportunities for advancement? Is this a great country, or what?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Wednesday September 14 2016, @12:13PM
I wish we could figure out who paid this troll. "Deep and rich" set of grants? Sounds like a "deep and rich" fucking by wealthy men who took a system that already favored them and skewed it ever-more in there direction.
Please, continue to pretend that every student has access to money that allows them to go to college on the cheap. I can only hope you experience the despair that you pretend doesn't exist for other people right now.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:54PM
Yeah, this benighted creature is surely part of some ridiculous astro-turfing venture, but it's hard to opine whose. Hillary's? Wouldn't be Trump's, because his slogan is "Make America Great Again," not "America's 100% Great Now." Maybe the student loan industry or Wall Street are watching the student debt internals or millenial employment deficits and are trying to soften the imminent blowback.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:41PM
I don't know what crack you're smoking, or if you have some super secret knowledge that no one else knows, but all that happened with those grants and scholarships was that colleges raised their tuition rates accordingly to soak up the entire pool of available money. And those grants and scholarships were never for non- non-white people to begin with, and even if you managed to land one they never covered anything close to the cost of your college. I had a National Merit Scholarship, which are pretty hard to get, and it covered about $5K/yr for tuition that cost $25K. Super great, guys, thanks!
I have also no idea what you're talking about having your student debt forgiven, because in the mid-90's they changed the bankruptcy laws in the United States to make it impossible to ever get out from under student debt. Or perhaps you're talking about something like ROTC. Yeah, you know what happened to my friends that took that route? One narrowly escaped being stop-lossed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan after giving 4 years' active duty and then 8 years reserve duty (the deal when he signed it was 4 years active duty or 8 years reserves, not both, but they decided to alter the deal...), and the others are still there in Afghanistan, in their 40's!
Real incomes have been on an uninterrupted 40-year slide. Wealth inequality is greater now than it was the era of the Trusts. You're arguing that things are great?
I'm not a boomer or a millenial, but I can observe that you have industrial sized blinders on, or have lived an incredibly charmed life that you have not experienced the vicissitudes of late 20th- and early 21st-century America.
The rage is justified, because it is based on reality. And "figure out how to fix it?" Maybe he should just work & study really hard and watch the rewards roll in for his diligence...? You're the one who is more guilty of believing in fairytales of self-righteousness.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:37PM
Enjoy a six pack of your favorite on me. Very well said.
My son & I liked to laugh at the bumper stickers on the cars we'd see, until one day we saw one of the "Spending my child's inheretence!" ones. My son asked "Isn't that kinda stupid? I mean if you spend the money we'll need to take care of you in your old age, aren't you pretty much asking to wind up in a leaky cardboard box forgotten under a bridge? Don't nursing homes cost money?"
He was eight years old & the phrase "Out of the mouths of babes" couldn't have been more apt if it had been written for the moment.
I decided right then & there I would *NOT* be spending my son's inheretence since I'd REALLLLLLY like not to spend my "Golden Years" shivvering in the rain & catching rats for food. =-\