My own parents were baffled when I showed no interest in getting a permit or driver’s license in high school, and looking around my school, I could tell they were not the only ones. Classmates came in with stories of their parents bribing them with contributions to down payments or later curfews. There seemed to be a sudden franticness in our parents, from our perspective, over something that should at most matter to them only because it meant we could run grocery errands or chauffeur little siblings. It became clear that driving meant a great deal more to our parents than it did to us. For us, it was a convenience and a skill; for them, it was a rite of passage, and a symbol of freedom. Today I seek to explain to an older generation both through practical terms and through social ones why the teen in your life doesn’t really care much about driving.
Expense and access
The most practical and most obvious reason first: the cost. Both new and used cars have gone from steadily increasing in price to surging in recent years. Manufacturers see little point in making economy cars due to their low profit margin. Much like starter homes, starter cars are being phased out entirely. In 2024, CNBC reported this rise in price is due to evolving technology:
“Now, [cars] are a luxury product that cost about $50,000, rising 30% in just a few years. Affordable vehicles, especially those below the price of $20,000, have nearly disappeared. Automakers pulled in record profits in 2023, but investments in EV batteries, software and other technology makes it hard to produce cheap cars. Margins are already slim and Chinese automakers who can, are impeded by tariffs.”
Lining up the years, it makes sense why that sudden drop around 2010 had no chance of recovering.
Of course, more goes into getting your first license than just the cost of a car, and I’m sure many would say it’s normal to get a license well before owning your first vehicle. Learning how to drive has become more inconvenient, too.
In the early 90s, American public schools suffered budget cuts so critical that there was a timely episode of Hey Arnold! about the students needing to share desks and books. In a 1991 Time article, one public high school teacher’s situation spelled it out, “At one point he had an annual paper budget of 2,000 sheets for five classes of 28 children each. So if each student used one sheet a day, he would run out in three weeks.” Driver’s ed, an expensive optional class, was quick to go.
Ten years later, The No Child Left Behind Act famously put all resources towards math and reading test scores, cutting funding to music programs, home economics, and extracurriculars of all kinds as fat—and sometimes altogether. Driver’s ed and auto shop could not sound more superfluous. A small dip accompanies both of these events, but the driving programs weren’t reinstated afterwards. They only continue to disappear.
In 2020, WCPO reported there are no high schools in Cincinnati teaching driver’s ed. According to the article:
“It became not cost-effective to offer it in the schools. When you think about insurance cost, cost of maintaining and driving cars around, it became cost prohibitive for the schools to house it here,” said Mike Belcuore, manager of the AAA Driver Education Program. “That’s why it moved more into the private business.”
Most states still require a form of driver’s education for a teenager to earn a license, leaving teens with the option of private driving schools such as AAA that start at $400.
Culture shifts
All of that covers why driving might feel like more of a hassle or more out of reach, but what about that fire that’s just not there? What about freedom? Not the students who want to learn to drive but tragically cannot, but the ones who probably could but just don’t see the point in rushing? This, too, is an easy change to understand: younger generations don’t really mind staying home. In fact, the youngest generation recently spent a very long time home, so suffice to say, they are used to it.
Where might my parents have gone when they were my age? Browsing music at the record shop, playing at the arcade, meeting their friends at the mall, swimming at the rec center? Most of these places are dead or gone. According to a JJL report from 2023, mall vacancies are at their highest in fifteen years. Shopping has largely been replaced by ecommerce, and with Amazon’s shipping, our purchase could be at your door later today. Just look at the company’s growth. It has all of our business.
Meanwhile, teens today can stay social from home with social media, messaging, and video games. Cyberspace is the new third place. Half of teen boys in America say they play Fortnite to catch up with friends.
There are times when you really do need to get somewhere, but then, there is the rise of rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft. Uber has created Uber for teens, a speciality account for this demographic that draws in parents by catering towards safety with features such as unique PIN verification, ride tracking, and audio recording. Coincidentally, Uber for teens is hosting a promotion that runs from January 9 – March 31, 2025, which gives any teen (13 – 17 by their count) on the Uber for teens account who has failed their driver’s test a month of free rides.
This simultaneously exemplifies another change in the modern teen’s life and culture: parents monitor their children much more. When I was a teenager, it was incredibly normal—expected even—for your parents to track your location through your cell phone, and we joked that two missed calls from mom either means someone is dead or you are about to be. On a purely anecdotal level, there was still sneaking around, but that was also done online on accounts made with email addresses my parents didn’t know about. An older friend of mine recently said that it was important for her to get a driver’s license, because all she wanted at that age was to get away from her parents. She and her friends would hang out in Walmart parking lots with nothing to offer but for their parents had no way to reach them, and for that, asking your parents for a ride was unthinkable.
So if not the freedom to see your friends and not the freedom to go buy what you want and not even the freedom of being inaccessible to your family, what is driving for? I still love seeing movies in theaters, but the last time I went to the Cinemark with a friend, I was charged $30 for a small popcorn and two bottles of water. That’s without tickets! Next time, we can wait a few months and stream it at home on my laptop. If one of us is out of town, we can make a watch party on Discord and message each other commentary the whole time. And if we really want to check out a restaurant not in walking distance, calling a ride everywhere costs about the same as car insurance would anyways.
America is a big place
In fairness, I shouldn’t speak so universally. In the process of writing this article, a classmate told me that my every point sounds foreign to her; she spent her teens in a rural area that had no rideshare drivers, spotty internet, and little to do. She says everyone wanted their license as soon as possible, and unless you were a serious gamer, just going for a drive was a standard way to hang out. To investigate this, I checked how common teen drivers are in states with high population densities vs states with lower ones.
I guess teens today aren’t any more a monolith than they were in the past, and everyone has their own circumstances. That said, there’s no denying that things have changed. If you’re a parent or grandparent or aunt or—I don’t know—an over-involved neighbor, and you worry about a teen in your life who is not showing the sort of ambitions you remember having at their age, remember that they are growing up in a very different environment that is shaping those ambitions. They may value a different accomplishment if you ask, or they may want to learn to drive but just haven’t been able to find lessons. Either is worth a conversation, but rest assured they are not falling far outside the norm.
Emma Eisenberg
Emma Eisenberg is a graduating senior at Savannah College of Art and Design. She is ecstatic to have Nightingale as her first publication and hopes to make use of the data journalism she’s learned going forward.
