More about the shift away from driving.
“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”
Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.
Their two big findings about young people and driving:
The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.
The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
via Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.
My son didn’t get his license until just weeks before his 18th birthday. My daughter is 16 and has her permit, but she doesn’t seem to be any hurry to log her practice hours so she can get a license.
Also, as Henry Ford noticed 100 years, if your customers can’t afford your product, you have a problem.