This article from Atlantic Monthly saying Millennials are not interested in houses and cars has been talked about a lot. The car companies think they just haven’t hit on the right propaganda yet:

Don’t blame Ford. The company is trying to solve a puzzle that’s bewildering every automaker in America: How do you sell cars to Millennials (a k a Generation Y)? The fact is, today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

In a bid to reverse these trends, General Motors has enlisted the youth-brand consultants at MTV Scratch—a corporate cousin of the TV network responsible for Jersey Shore—to give its vehicles some 20-something edge. “I don’t believe that young buyers don’t care about owning a car,” says John McFarland, GM’s 31-year-old manager of global strategic marketing. “We just think nobody truly understands them yet.” Subaru, meanwhile, is betting that it can appeal to the quirky eco-­conscious individualism that supposedly characterizes this generation. “We’re trying to get the emotional connection correct,” says Doug O’Reilly, a publicist for Subaru. Ford, for its part, continues to push heavily into social media, hoping to more closely match its marketing efforts to the channels that Millennials use and trust the most.

I think Millennials have encountered a tough economy. If economic conditions improve and they have more money, they will find ways to spend it. But not necessarily on cars. I think cars are just fundamentally different from all the other things we can buy with our money. No other good just completely saturates the physical environment, and drives the entire way our physical world is set up, the way cars do. Cars have physically saturated our world to the point that there is no room to squeeze any more of them in. Getting around our car-oriented world is just not convenient any more, and people are smart enough to realize that no matter how much advertising is thrown at them. Advertising messages that cars represent “freedom” are just not going to resonate with most people any more. And as far as status and sex appeal, I don’t believe for a second that our species has fundamentally changed – those things still matter to our species of large hairless ape but they are moving on to new forms.

Cars kill, pollute, waste our space and waste our time – good riddance.