Sharon Terlep of the Wall Street Journal surprised me with this one. A few weeks back she wrote a piece on the problems car manufacturers face with modern kids. Simply stated, it is this: "Fewer teens today are getting their driver's license and more 20-somethings aren't sold on OWNING A CAR."
I nearly dropped my racing gloves. How could this be??!! Young people, the lifeblood of the new car business, don't want cars? It's official, I am a pathetically out of touch geezer. While my generation is paying a gazillion dollars for the cars of our youth at the Barrett Jackson auction, or at least watching our more successful contemporaries wave their paddles on the Speed Channel, kids are saying they'll wait for the "app".
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| Once the stuff of 16 year-old dreams...now, just another middle-age crazy mobile.. |
It's not like the car guys aren't trying. General Motors has appointed a "youth emissary" who says he hopes the kids will tell him what they want in their rides. John McFarland, a 31 year-old former Procter & Gamble marketing guy, spent the past year talking to more than 9000 16-to-30 year-olds about tech gadgetry and other goodies that will prompt them to purchase a car.
This struck me as, how do I say it politely, IDIOTIC! Nobody needed to ask guys like me questions like that when we were young. We wanted a car--ANY CAR!-to get us as far away from mom and dad as possible. How else were we going to study the female anatomy, smoke cigarettes, or have a few barley pops? The car was a right of passage--a ticket to the adult world, and we would not be denied.
Maybe it's because they don't need a place to hide from "the 'rents" anymore. Probably both parents are working two jobs just to keep the kids in Captain Crunch and Bosco and aren't home to cramp any teenage "style" or impromptu physical examinations. Cars? "We don't need no stinking cars!"
There is a slight glimmer of hope...
Bubba Watson, the young PGA star recently took $110k of his most recent golf winnings and plunked it down to purchase his "dream car", General Lee, the bomb that jumped the cop cars in the "Dukes of Hazard" TV show. "I almost passed out when I saw it and thought there was a chance I could get it," Watson said. After buying the car, Bubba said he drove it to a gas station and stopped at the In-N-Out, where he let dozens of people sit in it. Cool guy.
Maybe this is the beginning of a turn around in auto attitude or, more likely, it is just an aberration. Somehow we seem to have strayed from being a culture of fins and fuel injection to a nation of Facebook and photoshop. Instead of T-birds and tailpipes our kids seem to prefer Twitter.
Not me. NO way! Let the kids have their computers and the net, I'll be clinging to the memories of my first convertible, the freedom of the open road and the good times that happened on four wheels. "Won't you step into my office my dear?"
"Fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the Internet away" naahhh. Make mine gasoline.
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| If only the backseat could talk... |
There is a slight glimmer of hope...
Bubba Watson, the young PGA star recently took $110k of his most recent golf winnings and plunked it down to purchase his "dream car", General Lee, the bomb that jumped the cop cars in the "Dukes of Hazard" TV show. "I almost passed out when I saw it and thought there was a chance I could get it," Watson said. After buying the car, Bubba said he drove it to a gas station and stopped at the In-N-Out, where he let dozens of people sit in it. Cool guy.
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| Bubba's "General Lee" sled |
Not me. NO way! Let the kids have their computers and the net, I'll be clinging to the memories of my first convertible, the freedom of the open road and the good times that happened on four wheels. "Won't you step into my office my dear?"
"Fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the Internet away" naahhh. Make mine gasoline.
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| "We'll just park over here for a while. You can stay out a little longer. Your dad won't care." |
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