By Margot Amouyal
Aug. 20, 2024
Driving a car, long a symbol of true independence, is now more expensive and complicated than it’s worth for many young Americans.
This changed view on driving for teens and 20-somethings is manifesting itself in everything from a decline in car purchases to fewer road trips with friends. They say they’re often comfortable relying on public transportation, walking or having a family member give them a lift—and saving money along the way.
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The percentage of 19-year-olds with a driver’s license dropped steadily from 87.3% in 1983 to 68.7% in 2022, according to most recent data from the Federal Highway Administration.
Those who decide to own a car must contend with large jumps in costs, says Breanne Armstrong, director of insurance intelligence at research firm J.D. Power. Prices for cars, car parts and insurance have all risen in the past few years.
To Angelina Reyes, a 19-year-old student without a driver’s license at the University of Hartford from Connecticut, driving felt scary and wasn’t worth the expense.
“I was always sure of myself when I did things,” Reyes says. “Driving was one of the first times that I wasn’t.”
She says she has been fine without a license. Her parents or boyfriend drove her to her internship this summer. She says she’ll learn when she’s ready.
Car price crunch
Generation Z’s share of new and used car sales both dropped 0.1% between 2022 and so far in 2024, according to J.D. Power data. That might not seem like a big falloff, but when previous generations reached the stage Generation Z is in now, up to 27 years old, their proportion of car purchases rose 1% annually, says Tyson Jominy, vice president of data and analytics at J.D. Power.
“It’s extraordinarily rare, demographically, for this to be going backwards,” says Jominy.
The decline in younger consumers’ interest in buying cars is partly due to how vehicle prices have risen in recent years. Average new car prices are up 32.2% since 2019, J.D. Power data shows. The average is $44,604 as of July.
John Camou, a high-school senior from outside of Birmingham, Ala., has a license. He says many of his classmates don’t because of the costs. He drove a 2001 Ford Expedition until it broke down earlier this year. Now he occasionally borrows his parents’ car, a 2017 Chevrolet Cruze.
“It’s a really big financial burden,” says Camou, who worked at a fast-food restaurant in high school to pay for gas and car insurance. “I was spending a lot of time working just to get a car to be able to drive to work.”
Once young people get behind the wheel, they face escalating auto-insurance costs.
Younger drivers, in a cohort more likely to get in accidents, encounter some of the larger price increases. Three in 10 people ages 18 to 24 said that they had an insurer-initiated rate increase of more than $300 over the past year, a J.D. Power survey published in June of 41,242 U.S. adults shows. That is more than for every other age group and twice as frequent as in 2016.
Gavin Maretzki, a 19-year-old student at Schreiner University outside San Antonio, says he isn’t pressed to get a license. He has spent time practicing driving, but his family is happy not paying more for auto insurance.
He chats with friends on the social-messaging platform Discord instead of driving to see them, and his summer job was at a Little Caesars pizzeria a 15-minute walk from his home. Once Maretzki walked 10 miles to a Thanksgiving celebration.
“I was fully prepared to walk another 10 miles,” he says.
Road-trips and chauffeurs
The percentage of travelers ages 16 to 25 who said they plan to or typically take road trips dropped 24% between the first quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, according to surveys of over 2,000 people in the U.S. by the consumer-research firm GWI. This was the fastest fall of any age group GWI surveyed.
Ben Goldberg, a 29-year-old living near Washington, D.C., says his parents didn’t have the time to teach him to drive in high school. He never got around to it once he started a full-time job.
The IT-industry worker never takes road trips. Instead, he relies on the bus and Metro to get around.
“It’s just not a priority in my life,” he says of driving.
Brandon Schoettle researched why teenagers are less inclined to drive when he worked at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.
He says the decline extends beyond costs. Parents have become more willing to drive their teenagers places instead of having their kids rely on bikes or public transportation. They also must bear more of the responsibility of driving when their kids decide against getting a license, he says.
The rise of Uber and Lyft likely can’t alone explain teenagers driving less, says Johnathon Ehsani, a transportation researcher at Johns Hopkins University. His research suggests that teenagers are using ride-sharing applications for a small portion of their transportation needs.
Chris Moore, a 52-year-old IT operations management in Matthews, N.C., says he would shuttle his license-less 23-year-old daughter five times a week to soccer practice when she was in high school. He wanted her to spend her time on academics to get scholarships for college, Moore says.
He remembers when getting a license was the most pivotal moment of a teen’s life.
Now, Moore says, “My job is to be a taxi.”
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