To leap right to the correction, see this footnote:1
It has been a month since I inflicted Ten Charts In Ten Days on you. We’ll resume a less frenzied cadence now. I have quite a few topics stored up. But let’s ramp up slowly, with just one small data point presented today. A contrarian one in fact, and I love contrarian perspectives. (I mean, do you really need another chart reinforcing some obvious consensus view like “electric vehicles are a big deal”?)
This one almost slipped by me since it was just a small part of a more extensive analysis released on January 3 by Cars.com as part of its 2024 Automotive Trends look-ahead, which was based in part on a statistically-robust survey of some 4,000 consumers. (Thanks, Cars.com!) We’ll set this up as a quiz. For each of the two survey questions shown below, try to guess which answer came from which generation of respondents (e.g. Gen Z, Millennial (aka Gen Y), Gen X, Baby Boomer, Traditional, etc. Hint: for both questions the same two generations are the answers, one for each color.
Of course (speaking sardonically), this is easy, right? We all know younger Americans have been delaying getting a car, and younger Americans are more online than older ones, right? And broadly speaking, this has been true: for example, for quite a while now we’ve seen younger Americans deferring getting their first driver’s license (though this drop in “young” licenses is more than offset by older Americans persisting in driving longer).
But maybe the winds of change are shifting yet again. Here are the answers:
Yes, folks, from this sample at least, we see that Gen Z’s (born 1996-2015) tended to get their first car at an earlier age than Millennials (1977-1995), and that they are less eager to buy cars fully online than their immediate elders. So much for two pieces of conventional wisdom. First, that as each new generation is more digitally-enabled than the last, and second, as each is more comfortable with alternatives to car ownership (such as scooters and ridehail) than the last, then younger folks should be more averse to car ownership, and also prefer clicks to bricks.
Maybe, maybe not: it’s just one survey. But perhaps once again we are seeing the power of Mean Regression. Maybe Millennials like online shopping in part because it is still novel to them, whereas for Z’s, going online is so ubiquitous now that it has no special appeal. Or maybe after seeing a dozen or so Fast & Furious movies sprint across their iPhones, the kids are starting to think that having their own ride might be cooler than trundling along in the rain on some beat-up rental2 scooter.
In any case, these data may, just maybe, indicate that the American love affair with the car is reviving, and further, if that is the case, then with it may come a return to taking a look at your cool new purchase in person, rather than on a phone. We’ll see if this data point is the harbinger of a youthful new trend, or just a flash in the (avocado toast) pan.
Thanks to sharp-eyed reader Cameron Fleming (I knew somebody read these posts, I knew it!) I’ll have to back off on my admittedly-tentative remarks on the whole when-did-you-get-your-first-car question. As CF points out (if I understand correctly):
We’d expect the proportion of Gen Z car-owners who got their first cars between 16 and 18 to be higher than for Millennials, just because of arithmetic. The oldest Generation Zs are 25, while the oldest Millennials are 45, so Zs have had up to nine years to buy cars, three of which were between 16 and 18, while Ms have had up to twenty-nine years to buy cars, of which, again, three were between the ages of 16 and 18. So even if we pretend first-car age were evenly distributed for both, the fraction 3/9 is still greater than the fraction 3/29. To really know if Generation Z is getting more into cars, we’d need to compare the proportion of Zs that had a car at, say age 25, for example, with the percentage of Ms who had a car at their age 25.
Absolutely right. We can’t draw the conclusion that Zs are more into cars than Ms, from these data.
I suppose we can still draw the much weaker conclusion that Zs are getting cars early in life at a higher rate than we might have expected: an even distribution of first-car ownership for Zs would indeed yield a 3/9, or 33%, answer, and since they reported a higher number, 42%, they do seem to be “front loading” their first-car experience to some extent. (If they were all ride-hailing and biking until their 20s, which more radical War On Cars types have sometimes predicted and always advocated, the number would be 0%.)
Good catch CF, and thanks for alerting me to it. Should Car Charts ever order up souvenir mugs, you’ll get one. I’ll drive it over to you. Or scooter it. Or Uber.
Sorry, it’s not shared, it’s rented. It’s only shared if you feel that the company is sharing the scooter with you because you shared your money with them…