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Generation Z is weird about cars but I’m totally normal

In what should be an epochal household shift, my son got his driver’s license a few weeks ago. This culminated months of begrudging participation in one of the main rituals of American young-adulthood. He didn’t really want to do it. Some of this resistance was on principle. He’s the president of the Public Transit Club at his high school. But there was also generational ennui. Apparently the Zoomers just aren’t that into driving.

“Look,” I said, after his sixteenth birthday, “you live in California. You need to know how to operate a motor vehicle.” After all, reliable public transit only exists in tiny, Marxist enclaves where public services haven’t been repudiated as against the natural, Hobbesian order of American society. 

I also said that, since he lives in the United States of America, where the sweet lord Jesus wants everyone armed to the eyeballs with military-grade weaponry, he also needs to know how to safely unload a firearm, should he encounter one. But first, driving.

My son is thoughtful and careful behind the wheel. He easily passed the road test and now he is a licensed driver. But he has yet to ask to use the car. To a Gen-X father, this is deeply weird, and it makes me want to search his room for drugs (not a chance) and anarchist literature (maybe?).

But why does he need to drive? Since the pandemic, he and his friends have been comfortable socializing online, often through a combination of Minecraft and Discord. The ritual of suicidal teenage motoring is one more cherished American tradition you can bury at the altar of social media, along with having a functioning news industry and vaguely normal politics. When my son does want to hang out in person, he bikes to the train station and meets his friends in San Mateo, five stops away, where the good Asian food is. 

Another typical commute on the 101, the Silicon Valley meat grinder.

As a creature of ‘80s suburbia, I could not get my driver’s license soon enough. I was sixteen and about five seconds old when I took the road test. At the end, the instructor looked at me, contemplated what he was about to unleash on the world, and said, “Well, technically you passed…” After that, all I heard was Charlie Brown-teacher trombone noises. Wah WAH wah WAH WAH. I proceeded to defile the formerly placid streets of Palo Alto in my mom’s Datsun B-210 station wagon at every opportunity.

That shitty Datsun was Freedom! At least, on the rare occasions my mom would let me use it. In the ‘80s, the most exciting thing happening in telecommunications was Touch-Tone™ dialing. If I wanted to talk to my buddy, Bob, I had to call from the household telephone on our kitchen wall, like an animal. I might have to exchange pleasantries with his mother! Mortifying! And then I would leave a message that would go into the abyss and I’d still have to bike over to his house to see if he wanted to, like, get a Slurpee. With cars we could make it to Mountain View for burgers, to Golfland in Sunnyvale for video games, or out for all-night D&D.

Possibly compensating for the Datsun and my mom’s later but equally emasculating Volvo station wagon, I had a minor car fetish through my late high school and early college years. Some of my friends had terrifying muscle cars and we would cruise and do parking-lot burners. I would flip through car magazines with them, looking at photos of immaculately restored Detroit masterpieces with vast, gleaming engines that couldn’t possibly have been weird proxies for sexual potency. 

The first car I owned was a weathered, orange 1972 Volkswagen Beetle that my father handed down to me before my sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz. It was as un-muscled as a car could possibly be and its tweetling engine was a proxy for sexual abstinence. I ended up selling that car to a friend in Santa Cruz for $70. I had someone in San Jose who was going to pay more, but the car couldn’t wheeze its way over highway 17 and I had to abort and limp back down the hill into town.

That was the last car I owned for more than thirty years. In nearly two decades in Asia I never owned a car. I did drive in Singapore from time to time, but in Singapore, Beijing and Shanghai my regular commute was always either public transit or, for a couple of lucky years, walking. The great thing about dense, Asian cities is that amenities are almost always just a short walk away and often right downstairs, at the bottom of your apartment block.

It wasn’t always a dreamy public transit fantasy. For years in Beijing I took Line 1, the east-west route that runs under Chang’an Ave. This was Beijing’s original subway line, opened in the Maoist pomp of 1971 and still gloriously un-airconditioned in 2004. Taking Line 1 at rush hour in summer in a suit and tie was like being microwaved. It was always jammed and airless and there were occasional fights and body fluid escapes. But it was cheap, reliably got me to and from work, and I had time to read a magazine.

In 2010 I changed jobs. My new office was in Wangjing, in the city’s northwest, miles from downtown and beyond the reach of the subway system. I gamely tried to take public transit once. It took me an hour and half and I arrived at the office looking like I’d been mugged in an alley by a feral lacrosse team. Never again.

I started taking taxis to and from work. We lived in a central area and it was easy to hail a car in the morning. But getting home was tough. Flagging a taxi in Wangjing at 6PM in the days before ride apps was like conjuring a particularly reluctant demon. One had to draw arcane symbols and mutter incantations and even then you probably just got a whiff of sulfur for your trouble. If it was raining, forget it.

To this day there is, in my opinion, no one lower than the sleazeball who strategically positions themselves a little way up the block you’ve already been working for a taxi for half an hour. In drug dealing or sex work, jumping someone’s corner like this would get you whacked, and rightly so.

In 2011 an ex-colleague moved back to Singapore, and I hired her driver. Mr. Wei owned an unglamorous black Volkswagen Santana, which was the poor man’s black Audi, then the ride of choice for Beijing’s newly affluent. Wei was cheerful, reliable, patient, kept the car clean, and didn’t smoke in it. This was a welcome change from our previous occasional driver, Mr. Jing, who was prone to chain smoke, suck his teeth in aggravation at life’s crushing injustices (red lights, pedestrians, other motorists) and mutter darkly under his breath. 

For two years Mr. Wei picked me up in the morning, we dropped my son off at school, and then he took me to the office. At 6PM he would be waiting for me downstairs. On my son’s fourth birthday, Mr. Wei gave him a huge, remote controlled toy Audi Q7. Big dreams!

My then four year old son with Mr. Wei’s birthday present, which would turn out to be a remote controlled toy Audi Q7 SUV. This toy would make it back to the US with us.

This was the apex of my colonial lifestyle. Commute-wise I never had it so good. I sat in the back of Mr. Wei’s Santana and rolled like a baller, reading the Economist or playing Angry Birds on my Motorola Xoom tablet as we crawled along the constipated Fourth Ring Road. 

And then we moved back to the US and my colonial lifestyle evaporated with the reset of relative income from “princely” to “lol.” At age 45 I was, for the first time in my life, an American car commuter. Worse, I was commuting on US 101, the notorious Silicon Valley meat grinder. I might have had muscle car dreams in my youth, but as a middle-aged dad practicality ruled. I put my balls in escrow and bought a used Prius and a Subaru Forester, which is basically a Prius going through early puberty.

God, I hated that commute. If there was no traffic, it was 25 minutes from my house to the office. But there was ALWAYS traffic, so, 45 minutes moldering in the crawl each way, dueling with the wall of tech company buses and driving myself, like a fucking pleb. 

While I was out of the country, the normal cars I’d grown up with had been replaced by a selection of fantastical strip-mall assault vehicles and pickup trucks engineered to be both absurdly large and have front fascia resembling snarling wolves, presumably to make you Get the Fuck Out of the Way! Bloodthirsty militias around the world still use relatively modest Toyota Hiluxes to make “technicals” —pickup trucks with mounted machine guns— because, I am sure, they looked at modern American pickup trucks and said, naw, man, too much. Driving a Prius in this company is like skateboarding in a demolition derby. 

The typical, snarling American pickup truck. Hang a Royal Pine air freshener on your door so this beast doesn’t devour your children in the night. Photo by J Z on Unsplash

For seven years I dragged myself up and down the 101, incinerating an hour and a half every day. By Bay Area standards, that’s a reasonable commute, but that is of course the problem! It’s not reasonable! It sucks! It’s automotive Russian roulette every day. I‘m a careful driver and I still had dozens of near-misses. Regularly someone doesn’t look up from their smartphone in time and an accident turns 45 minutes into 60 or 70 or 80.

Then the pandemic hit. This was a great tragedy that inflicted boundless human suffering and death, condemned my son to nine months of remote schooling, and became the dumbest-ever American political wedge. But…also…it was pretty good for me? My company embraced remote work and I didn’t have to drive the 101 anymore. For four glorious years my commute was shambling into the garage, where I built my workspace. The biggest safety risk was passing through the kitchen on my way and colliding with snacks. Time I used to spend commuting got absorbed into my work day and I didn’t even care!

The dream is over. My new company is very much an in-office culture. I researched how long it would take me to cover the 22 miles to the office on public transit. Two hours minimum each way, via bus, Caltrain and VTA light rail. There isn’t enough virtue in the world to make me do that, so I am once again battling my way up and down the 101, hoping the demon trucks don’t claim my soul. That I’m willing to do this should tell you how excited I am about the job. 

Age has rewritten my relationship with cars. When I was a teenager, cars were freedom and fun and (notionally) sex appeal. Now I am a middle-aged commuter and my car is a tiny prison to which I am sentenced every day and that I pay for. Cars are stress and maintenance and gas and, especially with a teenage son, insurance. Good thing we still own the same cars we bought twelve years ago when we returned to California. Our current plan is to drive them into the ground until we move back to Asia in two years.

I am sure my kid, president of the Public Transit Club, has observed of all of this. He is fortunate that our limited public transit options cover the things important to him. He’s proud of being able to live his life without needing to drive. He doesn’t have the same teenage fetish I did, which is good. He looked at what cars had become to his parents, and what life was like on the freeway and, like the Janjaweed test-driving an F-150 as a possible weapon, decided, naw, man, too much.