Generation Y are fuelling the change to Hybrids and Electric Cars
It’s the Generation Y car buyers that are driving the change to hybrids and electrics, not GEN X or the baby boomers.
The car landscape is changing. Dramatically. Big, thirsty V8, V10 and V12 engines are starting to feel as if they’re from another age. They’ll survive, of course they will. But big, powerful performance cars are going to end up as toys. Just toys. They will probably no longer power our daily drive. That will be left to a combination of electric, hybrid and fuel cell cars.
But there’s no need to panic yet. No one is going to force the entire world in to an eco box for decades – or even generations – to come. But the change is starting to happen, fuelled (pun untended) by the man-made global warming myth. And it is a myth. The climate is certainly changing, but then it always has. There’s nothing new going on, just more evidence of change for the first time in living memory. Which is of course our most relevant perception.
And the obsession with targeting the car user as the object of vilification for this fabrication of pseudo-fact is probably not going to change. Even though cattle, dogs, planes, boats… all have more impact on the climate if you use the same models as the ‘scientists’ use to assert that global warming is man made.
We of ‘Generation X’ and the ‘Baby Boomer’ years don’t – on the whole – buy in to most of the theories. But ‘Generation Y’ do. They’ve grown up with a rapidly changing technological landscape and seem to be accepting of the changes the world throws at them. They are less questioning of things; certainly less able to stand on there own feet in a practical way. They want things on a plate and they accept what they’re given. And they’re the people who are buying the hybrids and the electric cars.
And now Generation Y is getting older. They’re starting families. They’re hitting 30. And they’re buying cars to run a family round in. So they’re looking at bigger cars, not little boxes. But the power in the daily drive doesn’t motivate them as much as the sound system. They’re happy with less power and lower running costs. They want creature comforts. They want a home on wheels. They are looking for transport that suits their needs, rather than a ‘Drive’.
Maybe they’re really more grown-up than we give them credit for. Perhaps it does make more sense to save the powerful, thrill-inducing, fuel guzzling performance car for a weekend toy. Perhaps we GEN X & BBs need to stop seeing our cars as an extension of our personalities and see them instead as simply personal transport. Maybe we should buy in to a daily transport that boringly takes us from place to place in comfort – and economically – and accept the journey as something to tolerate to get from A to B. A bit like ‘personal public transport’.
Naah!!
Note:
In case you’re not aware, Baby Boomers are considered to be the generation born in the boom years after WW2. Generation X (or GEN X) are those born from the late ’50s onwards. And Generation Y are those born from the mid-late ’70s. Roughly speaking.
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