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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/sunday-review/the-end-of-car-culture.html?pagewanted=all
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S ambitious goals to curb the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, unveiled last week, will get a fortuitous assist from an incipient shift in American behavior: recent studies suggest that Americans are buying fewer cars, driving less and getting fewer licenses as each year goes by.
[h1]Young Americans ditch the car[/h1]
By Steve Hargreaves @hargreavesCNN September 17, 2012: 11:30 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
[h2]America's young people just aren't buying cars like they used to.[/h2]
The share of new cars purchased by those aged 18-34 dropped 30% in the last five years, according to the car shopping web site Edmunds.com.
Some say the economy is mostly to blame -- that the young aren't buying because they've been particularly hard hit by the recession.
But others say the trend could be part of larger social shifts.
One reason is demographic: The re-urbanization of America is giving more people access to public transportation. The advent of Zipcar (ZIP) and other car-on-demand businesses is eliminating the need to own and insure an expensive vehicle that often isn't driven much.
But mostly it's the explosion of social media. Car ownership just may not be as socially important as it used to be.
"What we used to do in cars, young people are now doing online," said one analyst at a recent oil conference.
The ability to meet and interact with people on the Internet is largely replacing the need to hop in a car and cruise down the strip.
Couple that with more recent restrictions on driving -- later ages for licenses, limits on how many people can be in the car, restrictions on cell phone use -- and the Internet may be surpassing the automobile in the category that gave cars so much appeal: freedom.
"When I got into a vehicle, it represented me going to meet my friends," said Craig Giffi, automotive practice leader at the consultancy Deloitte. "For them, it cuts them off from their friends."
This is particularly true for the youngest, most digitally-connected members of Generation Y. Forty-six percent of 18-24 year-olds would choose Internet access over owning a car, according to a recent Deloitte study.
Related: America's best-loved cars
It's a trend the car companies are noticing as well.
"With this generation, what owning a car means is completely different from previous generations," said Annalisa Bluhm, a spokeswoman for General Motors. "It was a rite of passage. Now the right of passage is a cell phone."
With the Baby Boomers, Bluhm said three-quarters had obtained early life's five big rites of passage by the time they were 30 -- buying a car, graduating from college, getting married, buying a house and having kids. Now less than 40% of the under-30 crowd has all these things.
What's more, 30% of Baby Boomers considered themselves "car enthusiasts," said Bluhm, buying showcase vehicles like the Camaro, Corvette or Jeep. Less than 15% of Gen-Yers say the same, and they're flocking to more practical models.
"They have a number of things that validate them," Bluhm said. "The car is not their first purchase."
The real question for carmakers is whether young people will return to the showroom when the economy recovers. Many say they will.
"This is purely a matter of economics," said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at Edmunds.com.
Krebs said the drop in sales share by young people is misleading, as more of them are buying used cars or simply living at home longer and using their parents' vehicles. When the economy improves, they will be back en masse.
"We don't all live in urban areas and can get by without a car," she said.
Gen-Y'ers: Delaying adulthood
Analysts at Ford (F, Fortune 500) seem to think so too.
Young people may defer buying cars until the economy improves or they may live out their 20s in urban areas, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs and need vehicles, said Erich Merkle, Ford's U.S. sales analyst.
"They might be able to hold off for a period of time," said Merkle. "But Ford takes the long-term view -- They are going to be around for a long time and they are going to purchase many, many new cars."
But as Deloitte's Giffi said, the longer these young people go without cars, the easier time they have adjusting to life without one.
http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/17/news/economy/young-buying-cars/index.html
[h1]Generation Y And Consumerism: Waning Interest In Car Ownership A Sign Of A Deeper Shift[/h1]
Posted: 01/18/2013 5:09 am EST
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Zofia Koch doesn’t own a car, and she doesn’t seem to miss it.
“The last time I was excited about a car was high school,” the 26-year-old event co-ordinator said by phone from her apartment in downtown Toronto, adding that these days a car seems like more of an “added expense” than anything to get excited about.
“Owning a car is just another debt you’re carrying with you,” she said.
Like many in her generation — now commonly referred to as Generation Y or the Millennial Generation – Koch eschews owning a vehicle, at least for now.
But the phenomenon isn’t limited to the car. As the millennial cohort ages and moves into the workforce, observers are seeing a trend away from the splashy, unbridled consumerism of earlier eras, towards a new kind of thinking about ownership, one that affects everything from how we get around, to when we buy homes, right down to why people buy things at all.
In the new world of consumerism, it won’t be so much about “owning stuff” as it will be about improving one’s quality of life.
And if that means not buying a car, so be it.
“If I wanted to, I could totally afford a car,” said Josh Shier, a 22-year-old freelance stylist and writer living in Barrie, Ont., who never got a driver’s licence and cites environmental degradation and the conflicts surrounding oil as among the main reasons for his stand.
“But I’d rather be one of the Greyhound bus’s biggest customers.”
Shier says he is put off by the car industry’s “induced obsolescence” of cars that results in new models every year.
Koch sees things differently. It’s not that she doesn’t want one – she is eyeing buying a car as she and her husband contemplate a move out of the city – it’s just that the growing availability of other options, combined with the larger debt burdens young people are carrying today, makes it less of a necessity and more of a burden. Koch cites insurance payments, parking costs and gas among the many expenses that turned her off car ownership.
Technological changes are reducing the demand for private cars, according to a recent report from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as cited at The Globe and Mail.
The report cites Zipcar and other car-sharing services as being behind some of that waning interest in car purchases, at least in urban areas, along with bike-sharing services and the recent and sudden explosion of taxi-hailing apps.
The effects are noticeable. In the U.S., the proportion of 17-year-olds with drivers’ licences fell to 45 per cent in 2010, down from more than two-thirds in 1978.
“Similar trends are in place in Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan,” the Globe reports.
And she adds one other thing. In earlier generations, Koch says, “the novelty of being able to own something was greater than it is now.”
With that, Koch touches on a major underlying trend that is only beginning to emerge among today’s youth. It’s what Josh Allan Dykstra, founder of the consulting firm Strength Doctors, recently described in an article as “the death of ownership.”
The human race is undergoing an “evolution of consciousness,” and our ideas of what it means to “own” something are rapidly changing, Dykstra says.
“I don’t think people will stop owning things,” Dykstra said recently in an interview with The Huffington Post Canada. “But I think the way we do ownership is going to change. It’s going to be more about what we do with that thing [than simply owning it].”
Echoing Koch’s sentiment, Dykstra says ownership has become so commonplace – “It’s almost like we’ve commoditized ownership itself” – that it’s beginning to lose meaning. People simply aren’t as excited about owning things as they used to be.
In Koch’s view, our credit culture is responsible for this; we can buy what we want on our credit cards, so there is little of the waiting, planning and anticipation that used to make buying things so exciting.
In Dykstra’s view, it is all tied in to the rapid technological changes today.
“Growing up, I used to feel like I needed to hold on to things,” he said. “I need to keep this special comic book or whatever because it’s the only one that I’ll ever see. But now, if I want anything, I can just go online and find it. … The whole notion of what I need to hold on to, and what I can find in three seconds on Google –- this makes things completely different.”
Dykstra says the focus of consumers is shifting from ownership to access. While we used to buy records and record players, we now buy smartphones that allow us to play music. The phone is still “owned,” of course, but ownership of the phone is not the goal – it’s what that phone allows to us access that matters.
“It’s really just become more about how the things we own connect us to the stuff that matters to us,” he said.
Cars are not immune to this philosophy. After all, it’s where the car takes us that matters, not the car itself. And if you can get there without a car – or if, thanks to online shopping, you don’t need to go there in the first place – then the car becomes less important.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/01/18/generation-y-consumerism-ownership_n_2500697.html
so who else wanna be wrong?
da millennial
