That's a historical accident, not some fundamental of the human condition.
Already young people buy less cars than people their age 1-2 generations ago, and car-pooling is increasingly more popular.
Heck, suddenly a sizable percentage of the population became part-time taxi-drivers with Uber and Lyft.
There seems to also be a cultural element, and I doubt that can be solved with merely technological means.
Making the choice not to own gives you a leg up for other purchases.
Housing, I suspect is bennefitting from similar post-hoc analysis. "Millennials don't want to own homes" which I've seen in headlines should also be weighed against the fact the houses today cost many multiples more than a typical annual salary. I believe when my father was buying his first home the rule of thumb was "roughly 5* annual salary" nowadays in Toronto homes are easily 10*
This stuff (microhousing, ultra-mobility) isn't necessarily about "enlightenment amongst the youth" it's the crushing cost.
Was it about some fundamental inherent desire in the first place, or increased income then too, plus ample advertising and touting it as the "american way"?
Other regions, even as rich, don't place as much emphasis on car ownership.
10k a year only sounds reasonable if you're making payments, and I suspect the amortized cost once you (eventually) sell the vehicle will be much lower.
Granted, this is only my own experience, but considering it's so far off from 10k makes me wonder how accurate that statement is for the general population.
Lots of people are eating a few grand in depreciation each year, plus higher fuel costs, plus higher insurance rates. And don't forget financing costs, licencing, taxes. Many people are clearly eating more on depreciation than you are spending, all in.
10k may be a little on the high side, but 5 or 6k isn't at all (you're already at, what 3 to 3.5 on the cheap end).
So my napkin calculation was roughly $30k for the base auto, financed at $500/month for 5 years. $1000/year on insurance and $50/week on gas.
$500 * 12 = $6000 $50 * 52 = $2600 +$1000
total = $9600
In the above calculation there's $0 spent on service & $0 on financing interest. The theory is that as age goes up, the annual repair cost increases as well.
I think there's also a bit of a confound in the fact that I'm operating in Canadian dollars where my numbers might be inflated... as well, I haven't owned a car myself since somewhere around 2005.
My payment at the time was $450 on a Mazda 5.
All said and done though $5k to $10k is not a wildly unreasonable range. Which I think we were generally agreeing on.
Because cities are expensive infrastructure that takes many decades to change after it has been built. Unless an earthquake or other natural disaster or war takes a city down, change at the level of changing the roads, moving whole neighborhoods, etc is very slow.
They are also incredibly popular (if you take housing prices as a proxy for desirability).
Which is exactly the argument I wanted to make ;)
> It would be wonderful for me to go to bed and wake up 1000 miles away.
Trains do that already :)
Not-so-commercial robot car pools might even start getting viable in rural areas, because some countries mandate a minimum level of public transport coverage and basing a few robocabs in remote villages could be many orders of magnitude cheaper (and certainly more useful) than repeatedly driving an empty bus around just to fulfill a schedule so sparse that only the most desperate will ever bother using it. Another angle that might lead to pockets of rural adoption much earlier than expected: many rural populations already have a lot of experience with pooling agricultural vehicles, this could occasionally be a seed for adopting local pool e.g. to support the elderly and doubling as a fallback for personal vehicles.
Well, tough luck then. We have to make some sacrifices for the environment.
Our ancestors not that long ago, merely 50-70 years or so, walked on foot, for miles, to get to the same grocery store.