I asked my teenaged nephew the other day, while he was playing a car racing game, what he thinks would be a reasonable good first car for him. He is two, maybe three years from driving age. He grew up in the suburbs and both his parents have cars. Dad has a classic car for weekend pleasure driving. You get the picture. My nephew hadn't really considered getting a car. I can see the first car thing being a whole lot less of a thing for his generation than it was for his parents'. He would rather spend time tinkering on his computer than under the hood or behind the wheel like his father did.
To be fair, many people worked on their car because it was both accessible and a cheap way to increase the value of and/or reduce the cost of a large purchase. Cars' mechanical components have become less accessible over time, and while you can still work on them yourself, it requires either more knowledge to do so or to use more modular components where there's less technical work besides plugging it in.
Computer hardware isn't much better.
Software though, that's where I'm convinced this spirit is more alive than ever. Instead of racing his car your nephew may play racing games, and instead of working on his car to make it faster/better/cooler, he might become interested in making a game, or other software, and the bars of entry for that are lower than they've ever been, and are just getting lower.
I'm having a hard time imagining what world you live in where teenagers have ~$3000 + gas money in disposable income from their $7.25/hour jobs and no pressure to save it for college. My suburb was probably in the top 1% of property values in the state and only a few (~10 out of 250) kids "owned" cars, which their finance-industry parents bought them.
Most garages were 2-car, and you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow. I was actually offered my grandmother's car for free when she died, but my parents refused it because they didn't want to deal with 3 cars in a 2-car driveway and garage.
No one else had any say in what car they would drive; 99% of the time it was Mom's minivan or Prius, with constant tension over when the keys would be brought back home. 95% of my graduating class went to college, and all but a few of them lived in dorms (at least for the first year) where car ownership was neither necessary nor permitted.
None of us will be thinking about buying cars until we graduate. And even then, those who will have money to buy cars they want, instead of the cheapest thing that starts, will be the San Francisco software engineers and the Manhattan investment bankers, i.e. the people who don't need them. I know a few people who got cars out of necessity for internships in remote places, and on all accounts it was a ~10-year-old, boring, practical castoff of a middle-aged relative who wanted an upgrade, to be sold when no longer necessary.
Personally, I'd love a Jetta but I can't imagine what I'd use it for, and for the same amount of money I can get a fully-loaded rMBP, an iPhone, and less student debt.
> you don't want a car outside of a garage in snow
Why not? It works fine, and there are few places in the US cold enough to even require a block heater, let alone actually endangering the engine. Just have to brush it off sometimes, but it's hardly a dealbreaker. I lived almost 20 years in Alaska and never had a garage that we used for cars.
I agree with you... However, where do you (or your parents, I guess) live where you have a 2-car garage but not enough space to park a car on the street in front of your house? (snow isn't a real excuse, plenty of people in snowy places don't park their cars in garages)
Municipal ordinance - parking between midnight and 5am by permit only, only n nights per year per resident. Not sure how common this is for suburbia, but I gather it's not hugely unusual.
But you need to understand that this perspective doesn't exist for the middle 90% of the country and really only applies to the large metros where things are either dense enough for cars not to be generally necessary, or public transit is acceptably good. Everywhere else, most teens need a [cheap] car just to get to & from their part time & summer jobs, or to shuttle around their younger siblings.
Public transit is worthless where I grew up. Your choices are to share your parents' cars, get driven everywhere by your parents (most common), work at one of the 3 walking-distance employers, or simply not leave the house very much.
I live in Huntsville, AL. Where I grew up in Madison, AL, basically everybody in my graduating class had a car. Some were junkers and some were stupid expensive. I didn't have one until I bought one from my parents after my freshman year of college.
It might depend on where you live. For a teenager who lives in a reasonably dense area, even using Uber/Lyft to get around could easily be less expensive than car ownership. (I mean, geez, even just insurance premiums for teenagers are off the wall these days.) If that summer job is accessible without a car, that means it can be even more part time without sacrificing the ability to get around.
I lived in a very rural area so for me car ownership really did represent freedom. But if that weren't the case then I think that calculus would have been pretty attractive to me. Having the freedom to not spend so @$@#% much time doing menial crap like flipping burgers? Heck yeah.
