Yea. I think there’s genuine generational shift here. Which in many ways makes sense. I never heard a negative word from my elders/parents about cars, while I and many of my friends and partners have had one and arrived at fairly critical to down right negative views about cars and driving.

Why it would be generational strikes me again as fairly obvious.

Traffic congestion has only gotten worse over time. The freedom machine ideal of the car has therefore very much faded. And things like traffic jams and the general stress of driving and parking etc are the sorts of thing that are hard to unsee once you’ve seen them. The damage they do in destroying or preventing pedestrian friendly areas is similar. The whole climate thing shifts the value proposal again.

And then there’s the pure generational factor too. Cars are relatively new. It makes sense that they’ve been on some hype curve this whole time, peaking with the boomers. Now it feels obvious we’ve overdone it and relied on them too much. Watching plenty of cars scramble to find a car park or get stuck in traffic, each bearing a single driver/passenger while taking up 5-10 square meters … again hard to unsee.

Once you’ve seen or even lived a life without all that noise, they’re no longer the must haves they were for the past decades.

Yep. My parents offered to buy my gen Z brother a car, and he asked for an e-bike instead. I (a millenial) also choose to not have a car for both environmental reasons and just… not wanting to drive and deal with traffic and car maintenance and whatnot. Thankfully we live in a city whose public transportation’s getting better by day.

My partner and I live in Silicon Valley and it’s cheaper for us to rent a car when we need it than to own one. We’d use it maybe twice a month so rentals just make more sense. We’re moving to San Francisco soon though and at that point we’ll likely never own a car and just transit everywhere.