The weekend issue of the Financial Times has the front page headline ‘Cars no longer stars as the young find themselves forced off the road’. The story is that the number of young people taking driving tests is falling as high insurance costs and demographic changes begin to transform a generation’s relationship with cars. This is followed up over most of page 3, quoting me amongst other experts. The motor industry is well aware of the trend but uncertain how to respond. It hopes that when the economy recovers, young people will come back to cars. However, Gordon Stokes, of Oxford University, is cited as saying that people who learn to drive when they are less than twenty do about 40% more mileage a year than those who earn when they are about thirty.
There may well be a generational shift in attitudes to the car underway.