Honest question: are US movies for real with kids having cars?

And that's the big thing - in my area, there actually is a public transit system.

It's a point-to-point on-demand bus service, it's geared almost entirely for disabled and elderly people, and if you're not disabled, elderly, or a child, it costs $4 per trip and you have to schedule the trip 24 hours in advance for that pricing. Meaning, if you use it for a commute, it's $8 a day. And, if it's same-day service, I think it's $5 per trip, and no guarantee of any service.

In many areas, there's not even that.

 

Ahhh I see. Your roads are roads that have been made for cars. Our roads are still roads that were made for horses and carts, so it makes sense for public transport to be really quite good, when compared to the USA

 

around boston, your roads are our roads. but to get anywhere from here, made for cars. we do have a decent train from maine to d.c., and flying is always an option., but i can't get to the next town without a car.

 

It is actually less common now than when I grew up. Cell phones and social media now make it easier to have social connections without having transportation. And compared to cars, cell phone service is cheaper.

I grew up in a rural area. No car meant almost no social interaction with my own age group outside of the public school classroom.

 

Around here, everyone in highschool has a vehicle. My $800 Subaru was a year younger than I was and the rust holes were large enough to put your entire fist through. I carried 2L bottles full of water because every hour or so, you'd need to refill the radiator. I and about 10 or 15 other cars in our high school student parking lot, yes the school had 5 separate permitted lots just for student vehicles, were in similar states of disrepair. Everyone else, brand new luxury vehicles. I couldn't even count how many Mercedes G-Wagons (I called them "tin cans on wheels") there were, and these START at $120K. Porsche, Audi, Lexus, you name it all in the student lot. And the worst part? When school ended the entire 1200 students left all at one time. Which meant the parking lot became completely full of teens with cars trying to get out of school all at the same time which led to a game that everyone called bumper cars and it is exactly what it sounds like. $100K+ vehicles purposely bumping into other $100K+ vehicles as a joke or sandwiching them in so they were touching bumper to bumper. It was horrible. Luckily nobody cared about my rust bucket and I usually stayed at school for an extra half hour instead of sitting in the parking lot for a half hour.

One of my friends in the span of 2 years had given to him and crashed/totaled: a brand new Lexus GS450h, a brand new Lexus RX400h, a brand new BMW M5, and then the hand-me-down 1 year old Cadillac Escalade. But yes, that's just the way it is in the USA...

 

Makes me think of the Steve Miller song: Living in the USA.

 

Very common. It depends a bit on geography as well as some other factors, but in the US, you basically don't go anywhere that's more than 2 miles away via any other method than motor vehicles (there are a couple of large metro areas with exceptional public transportation that buck that trend, but it's an exception to have great public transport, not a norm in the US). Given that virtually everyone in the US is going to require trips that exceed that range on a regular basis, it's very common to get a vehicle for every eligible driver in the household (which includes 16-year-olds and up).

I got my first car the day I got my license at 15. It was beater, but it was a car.

 

Very common for kids to have a car of their own in the US. They are either hand me downs or self bought with money saved from summer jobs.
Just go search for any high school in the US on Google Maps and switch to satellite view. Those parking lots aren't for faculties only. A lot of times there aren't enough parking spaces that kids are forced to park on the streets.
So, yes, the movies and TV shows are correct.

 

LOL, this is what i did recently for my 16 year old boy. the car was like $700, but it turned out to be over $1000 after taxes and fees.

i expected it to last just a year. it's still running over 2 years later and he took it with him to an university.

the car for his older sister was a hand me down corolla. sadly, she totaled it after 3 years.

to answer the OPs question. in middle sized cities like mine, you cant function without a car.

big metropolies, especially east coast, are very different and most kids don't own cars.

 

well, yes, the cars are not moving when they shoot, LOL.

 

Generally speaking, the more affluent the parents, and especially the more affluent the area, the greater the likelihood the kids will be driving a vehicle. Oftentimes, kids get their parents' hand me down, which can be very NICE. Then the parents get a new car. Or sometimes the parents will spoil the child with a new car; this gives the parents and child bragging rights, for the wrong reason.

High School parking lot in Beverly Hills, Tustin, Newport, Corona Del Mar, Irvine, Palos Verdes, Manhattan Beach, etc, would look like a new car automall: many late model vehicles, predominantly German and Japanese.

In case you don't know, and I am sure most here would agree, the US as a whole is very materialistic. Many want to display their wealth (cars/jewelry/home), perhaps as a source of pride (look how wealthy I am) or to keep up with their neighbors ("keeping up with the Jones' "). Mixed-up priorities and cheap/easy credit allows this to happen.

The proliferation of vehicle leases enables people to drive nicer cars than they would otherwise be able to afford. It is not uncommon to find a lot of higher end Japanese (Lexus/Infiniti) and German (BMW, Mercedes), in apartment complexes, and not even in nice/wealthy areas.

In Manhattan (NYC), I have been told that you are quickly sized-up on wealth, based on clothing/jewelry. Makes sense, since few people drive cars there. So instead, they spend money on clothing. Granted this is hearsay, and a generalization, so take it as that. An interesting possibility/perspective.

Sadly, a majority, in the US, has their priorities screwed up.

This individual savings rate, per country, reinforces what most already know.

Personal Savings - Countries - List

Yup. This is an unexpected trend with these Gen X/Y/Z kids, and this has the auto makers concerned. The automakers want these kids driving yesterday, not years later.

The consensus I hear from parents of these kids seems to be driven by these factors: 1) Many school districts eliminated drivers education training in high school, a long time ago. This expense now becomes the parents. 2) High achieving kids are too busy to make time for driver's education due to homework and extracurricular activities. 3) Smart Phones have allowed kids to be with their friends 24/7. Text Messaging/Twitter/Snap Chat/etc. Then there are all the live interactive video communication programs: Face Time/Skype/etc. 4) Some don't feel a need to get a license.

 

I believe that this is true in a lot of places, at least among certain crowds.

But one of the takeaways from that long ago book 'The Millionaire Next Door' was that, across the country in general, most of the people who have it, don't show it. And most of the people who show it, don't really have it.

 

Ain't that the truth.

Always found it baffling why one would spend so much on a car (purchase or lease), when you live in an apartment or not so nice area of town.

 

Duplicate.

 

Wait a minute! I resemble that remark! Don't tell DW!
Or were you referring to old cars?
Ah contraire, I think the advent of You tube with contributions from folks like Nutzaboutbolts is a huge advantage over Haynes manuals with grainy black and white shots of miscellaneous car parts. Similarly, the easy availability of ODB-II readers or mini-Vci setups for gaining relevant information before using the wrenches is another big plus. So I think the resources exist to keep modern cars running if one really wants to do so. That said, the HV system on the Prius is truly different than the physical stuff I have dealt with before, so I will tread very cautiously when working on that part!

 

Keep in mind, when talking about the USA we are talking about a much larger total population than The Netherlands.

So we are talking about a much more diverse set of circumstance, and probably economic and social diversity as well.

So there are a LOT of "kids" that get vehicles relatively young, but just as many or more, that don't. So I think the USA is ALL scenario's in this case.

My parents did NOT give or get me a vehicle when I was young. A car, was one of the first things I worked towards obtaining.

Whether or not a young kid has a vehicle in a movie, probably depends a lot on what environment in the USA the movie is depicting.

 

That personal savings chart seems to be either very poorly organized or incorrect or just weird to view on mobile.

Are these savings rates? Are they dollar amounts? Are they amounts with respect to whatever the local currency is? Either way, I don't know if I can believe it. How can anyone have a savings rates greater than 100%? Are they saying this isn't recalculated on an annual basis (it's a cumulative savings rate)? Without any explanation, those numbers leave a lot more questions in my mind than answers.

If it's a cumulative savings rate, then holy cow, I don't know how people live the way they do. 5% of income saved is literally the definition of living paycheck to paycheck.

 

Various sites looked at different factors to determine average savings rates for each country. Some sites had the US at a skeptical higher savings rate than Japan! Only in a bizarro world (inverse parallel universe), would that happen. No consensus among sites. As Mark Twain once said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Its good to question/wonder about the source and what factors are used to determine the outcome. However, I am sure you could agree that the US, as a WHOLE, has a very low savings rate.

You may have a savings rate greater than 5%; good for you. Too many ignorant and stupid people not saving and investing in general. Many working poor, whomdo live paycheck to paycheck, and will likely be in poverty forever, unless they win the poor man's retirment, Lotto.

 

Typically, public transportation outside of large urban areas is minimal to nonexistent. So, to get anywhere, a car is an absolute necessity. But, there's one major exception, and that's buses to and from school. It is very possible for a high-school aged child to manage without a car, for the most part - although it does mean that parents are pressed into service as chauffeurs.

For a household to survive outside an urban area, at least one car is needed, or the family would be virtually trapped inside their house, except for school. Getting to a job would be difficult or impossible. The ubiquity of cars (and lack of planning) make riding a bicycle on the more-travelled roads very dangerous, if not actively suicidal. The vast majority of US households, moreover, are two-income families, while husbands and wives rarely work close enough to each other to commute together, so two cars are needed.

Now, add a driving-aged child or two. It is certainly possible, and common among the bottom half of the middle-class, for a household to share just two cars. But, doing so sharply restricts the child's/children's ability to drive - there's an advantage to at least one child having his/her own car, for both the parents and the child/children, if the family can afford it

Now, family and car economics. A six-year or seven-year car loan is common. At the end of that car loan, the car is owned outright by the family, but is still typically in very good mechanical shape. It's value, on the other hand, has decreased to about a third of the cost of a new car. The average cost of a car loan in the US is about $400 - $500/month. Trading in the old car for a new one might save $100 - $200 per month. But if a family doesn't trade in the old car, that means hanging on to it costs the family that same 100 - $200 per month, which is much less than it would cost to buy that car as a used vehicle.

So, you can see that providing a car for a child, or even two children in the suburban and rural areas of the US is not as big an expense as it might seem at first glance.

And yes, car loans are the norm. It's quite unusual for a car to be bought outright.

 

The fraction of new car purchased without financing is certainly small, but I'd dispute the 'quite unusual' description.

A brief news search finds hints in the range of 8-12% a few years back, but I thought cash sales were higher in my region. And when I bought my first Prius with cash in 2009, during the financial wreckage of the housing collapse when lenders were pulling back, the dealership was seeing plenty of other cash sales. I seem to remember a comment about it approaching half of sales at that particular time and place.

Private party sales of used vehicles are much more likely to be outright cash purchases.