6 ms·

Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.

by bennyg 11y ago

bunderbunder 11y ago
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.
superuser2 11y ago
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.
- ocb 11y ago
  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)
  - superuser2 11y ago
    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.
    - ocb 11y ago
      Wow, that's a hassle. Okay, I guess snow is a valid excuse then, haha.
    - Frondo 11y ago
      Where is that? I've lived a lot of different places in the US and I've never seen anything like that outside the downtown areas of really big cities.
- benaiah 11y ago
  > 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.
- bennyg 11y ago
  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.
- eitally 11y ago

Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.

by bennyg 11y ago

Give him 2-3 years and he'll tell you. Especially once his friends start driving and owning their own cars.

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.

superuser2 11y ago

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.

ocb 11y ago
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)
- superuser2 11y ago
  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.
  - ocb 11y ago
    Wow, that's a hassle. Okay, I guess snow is a valid excuse then, haha.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    Where is that? I've lived a lot of different places in the US and I've never seen anything like that outside the downtown areas of really big cities.
benaiah 11y ago
> 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.
bennyg 11y ago
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.
eitally 11y ago