Why Everyone (Read: Most Automakers) Are Wrong About Millennials

"Mandy" (Mandy) 08/09/2013 at 11:00 • Filed to: oppositelock, jalopnik, millennials

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First and foremost I would like to thank Mr. !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! for inspiring this social commentary in regards to his articles “ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ” and “ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ”. Hopefully I'm still comprehensible, as it has been a couple of years since I've written a well thought out essay of any kind, but I suppose that's a perfect segue; let's talk about myself and my education.

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I'm Edmund Mandell, but my friends call me Mandy, kind of like Mandel Patinkin, the actor, goes by “Mandy”. As you can tell from this picture, I assume, I look something like your average millennial, just without the stupid hipster glasses, and maybe a vest, or necessary tie. I'm a 24 years old, who recently graduated from “The U”. Some of my hobbies include obsessing over my car, stuffing my face with sushi, and melting my face on my computer screen playing games. Currently I have a couple of jobs; I work retail for a company that contracts to a number of different businesses for in-store demonstrations such as Bose, Cisco Systems, Fujifilm, and a few others. I also run a small on-site computer repair and instruction business out of my home for some supplemental income.

But let me paint a picture of myself right out of college. Some of my first thoughts after walking across the stage and shaking President Shalala's hand was something along the lines of “fuck, fuck, fuck, why did you decide to get a degree in psychology?” If you didn't know already, psychology majors are often grouped into three categories:

1) You're going to go to grad school because your psychology degree is worthless without a Masters in social work, PhD or a PsyD.

2) You're a slacker, and you know psychology is an easy major to blow four years on.

3) You genuinely believe a psychology major is useful in real life.

If you fall into the latter category, you may very well be gleefully ignorant, or me. Personally I fell into the first group initially, but after completing my undergraduate studies, and settling back home with my mother, reality quickly slapped me in my face. Literally the day I got home, I saw some bills with my incoming student debt, and it was absolutely colossal. Despite having oodles of financial aid, going to a private school costs, hell, going to a public school still costs, and I found myself about $35,000 deep over my four years. As you can imagine, after seeing the price tag, I quickly became wary of perusing graduate education.

Now, to emphasize the painful picture that put me in: 22 years old, no job, psychology degree, thirty-five-thousand in debt, bill is due this month. First thing you do is take whatever job pops up, so you contact friends and family, you use Indeed, Monster (sometimes the energy drink), LinkedIn, and whatever other outlet will poop out a job for you. For most of us millennials, that job often is close to home, pays minimum wage (some of us will be fortunate enough to get ten bucks or more an hour), has horrible and/or inconsistent hours, little-to-no promotabilty, and is almost always part-time with few, if any, benefits. Sometimes we'll even be lucky enough to find two employers that will actually work around your schedule at another job, but this is exceedingly rare when they can just find someone else.

Again, working eight hours a week, with no interest on my student loans (which did have interest, tons of it), at eight bucks an hour, it would take approximately 583 days to pay off. And that's is if I didn't have any expenses whatsoever. As you can imagine, that means very little-to-no disposable income. Now let's bite into the beef of this little essay.

The cheapest new car as of the time I'm writing this article, in the US of 'Murica is the Nissan Versa Sedan, which costs a whopping $10,990.

Stacking eleven grand of money I didn't have on top of thirty-five grand I didn't have, just doesn't sound like a good idea. I don't think any accountant or financial management figure would make a statement like “keep spending it, since you don't have it; you have the rest of your life to pay for it!” To top things off, it's not even an attractive little car, it's got four doors, and seats, but there's no wow-factor or pizazz for that hunk of metal I'm spending all of this minimum wage affluence on.

For two grand less I can get into a bunch of other vehicles that aren't as pedestrian, and offer a lot more fun and excitement, hell, I just found this on Craigslist for $8500:

Yeah, I'll be making the car payments in oil, but it has that, forgive my youth... swag factor.

So automakers, perhaps you have a better idea what you're up against. You'd have to make one badass Nissan Versa for us to show any emotion towards it. We're not apathetic social media butterflies who have our face glued to our smartphones all of the time, while riding bicycles and sipping Starbucks. Perhaps some of those stereotypes are true, but we care about cars, we really do!

The used car market is obviously one of the biggest things that deters millennials from buying new, as I mentioned earlier, many of us rather have an attractive older car than a newer econobox. Hell, we will take the old econobox for several thousand less. The irony of it is that I see a lot of auto makers actually pushing us even further away from getting those nice new cars too. I can see the scenario in my head. A bunch of 50-60 somethings, sitting around a table and saying “so what do these millennials like?” A hand goes up, “Twitter! Facebook!”, another idea is tossed out “they like driving to Starbucks with their friends “Brilliant, let's put a state of the art infotainment system in that, and make sure there's seating for four and lots of cup holders, then price it as low as you can!”

What comes out? Versa, Spark, Fiesta, Yaris, Soul, etc. etc. I apologize for picking on the Versa, but it really is the blandest of the bland. However, the Soul, I believe, is a pretty cool looking car. I actually had one as a rental car when my old car got totaled (it was a 1999 Hyundai Tiburon FX if you were curious, and I don't care what you say about it being a girl car, I loved it). Now coming from my 10 year old car at the time, I was really impressed by a lot of stuff on the Soul, it had standard Bluetooth radio that let me play songs from my iPhone, the looks of it grew on me, and after a while I wasn't even ashamed of the Kia badge. When it came to fill-up time, I was shocked at the seemingly poor mileage I was getting with it, and when you factor in the $15k price tag on it, insurance, gas, etc. we reenter my used car paradigm. Would you rather have a brand new Kia Soul, or two RX8's, maybe three Miatas, or whatever wonder car of yesteryear you had your eyes on?

This isn't a phenomenon; I don't think I'm the only person who thinks this way, I don't think my friends are the only ones who think this way either. To elaborate, I'm not a domestic driving e-thug or anything like that, I'm not part of a stance or euro-tuning posse, or the Civic club. All of my friends just have their own individual interest in cars. I'll talk about some of my closest friends briefly.

My best friend and his girlfriend have been upgrading their cars. He works as a small business consultant for a bank and recently upgraded to a 2004 Audi A4 Avant from the Audi dealership nearby, and he absolutely loves it, we call it the Swagon; I know, so original. His girlfriend traded in her Civic for a 370Z after scoring a new position at a healthcare company, and while I chastise her for getting it as a slushbox, she adores it, ironically, from what I understand, the slushbox is actually faster.

I got my first new car through quite a bit of fortune, I had a bit saved up in the bank, but nowhere near enough to afford what I wanted reasonably. I had inherited a house from my grandmother, sold it, and so I finally had enough to not only afford the payments on the car, but comfortably, afford the gas, insurance, and maintenance. It was really a godsend for me, because I had wanted a new car so badly, and for so long, that I couldn't believe I would actually be able to leave the dealership in something that I actually wanted, and not a four wheeled appliance. I hope this doesn't give me the appearance of a trust fund baby, I just consider myself extremely lucky, otherwise I would have just been grueling over an FR-S until I could make it a reality for myself.

That's me the day I took the car home, I was beaming with pride.

My girlfriend, whom I met at my first job out of college, still works in retail, and she doesn't own a car. Her family lent her the minivan, and she would drive it to work. Her dad owns a 5-speed Accord, but she didn't know how to drive stick, and her mother was never able to teach her, so you bet my ass that I spoke to her dad about it, and he allowed me to take her out in the car and teach her (I was driving a motorcycle at the time; slightly off-topic, my bike got better mileage then these new econoboxes, was faster than 80% of sports cars, barely required any maintenance, got infinitely more poonany, and didn't require insurance to ride. I live in Florida, so it was very practical). Anyway, after a few sessions, she started feeling confident enough to drive the Accord to work, and now she lusts over an early model Z.

This is all to say I didn't influence her into liking cars. I never said “hey, I love driving cars, I wish I could race cars all day, but I just don't have the money so I'm riding this motorcycle.” Truth be told, if I had the money I would have taken anything with four wheels and a five-speed. She still doesn't have a car, but she's been on the same boat of seemingly never-ending college debt, and because of those bills, a car payment, or enough savings to purchase something used, just never materialized. Needless to say, we all love cars, we love our cars, and we want to buy more cars in the future, we simply can't afford more of them now, and there's nothing new and cheap enough to purchase frivolously.

We joke about our elders these days, someone ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) got the perfect meme in Mr. George's article:

It's just not the same these days. These fresh out of college jobs pay nothing compared to what it costs to own a car, and the debt piled on top does not help. College used to be cheaper, cars used to be cheaper, jobs paid relatively more. Now that I've beaten that horse to death, let's talk about what automakers can do to help alleviate this issue. Because trust me, my friends want to buy your cars GM, Ford, Toyota, Nissan, etc. But you have to meet us half-way if you want us to pick up one of your nice new cars as opposed to something out of the newspaper (yes, some of us millennials still know what a newspaper is), or Craigslist. We will take that older car for less even without warranties and all the tech, especially if it looks cooler, or performs better to us subjectively.

Back in 1968 auto makers had the same idea, a cheap and affordable car for everyone.

Perhaps the VW Beetle rings a bell? Price at $1700, or approximately !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , auto makers can argue that they're offering a lot more at that price point than fifty years ago; however, I don't really think they're being as innovative about price point as they could be. In fifty years we still can't figure out how to make a cheaper car? You can do better auto industry.

So here's what I propose. First and foremost, start styling your smaller cars better. If I'm spending eleven grand on a new car, I damn well want it to be something to look at. Every day when I walk up to and away from my FR-S I give it a nice long stare, and take it all in. That just doesn't happen with a Prius, or the vast majority of economy cars these days. SRT has a commercial called “ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ”, it goes to illustrate what I believe a car should be; more than just metal and electronics, it has to be actively desired. Don't skimp on the design, because that's a huge part of the soul of the car. There's some cars I would admittedly own, a Nissan Juke for instance, even though it's not sexy per se, but I would be caught driving in one, especially AWD and 5-speed. However, the Juke is arguably high on the millennial affordability chart, which brings me to my second point: make it as cheap as you possibly can. Yes, we like our smartphone and whatnot, but that doesn't mean make the fancy head unit standard, and charge $1500 more for the car. I get it, you need to make a profit, and you can make much more of a profit if you sell a bunch of expensive cars, as opposed to a bunch of cheap cars, but look at the Tata Nano.

It's hideous, it's basic, but damn, they sell like hotcakes in their respective domestic market. So go barebones on us, and then let us deal with aftermarket solutions. Literally our smartphones can do 128% of what your head unit is doing already, just just give us the damn micro-usb, Lightning, and 40 pin chargers with a nice mount for our phone, and forget the rest, save us the money on it. Does it have A/C? Air conditioning I think will be the only non-negotiable creature comfort state-side, so make sure you keep that, you can do away with the digital clock too. Fine, we'll deal without power windows/locks/digital displays. We'll take it if it's basic yet stylish.

So my TL;DR (too long; didn't read) final advice for you automakers is this:
1) Make it look awesome
2) Make it cheap
3) Find a balance between one and two

Yes, there are all those “responsible” things we should care about like reliability, resale value, head room, truck space, and blah, blah, but those things are on the back of our minds. We're still young, and we simply don't care right now, so we'll sacrifice those things. We'd just like to go places, and have fun going there, and we wouldn't mind if we have to roll down a window instead of pressing a button; no wonder everyone is getting so fat, you can even make it a selling point “bicep shredding roll-down windows!” Alright, I'm going to put my college essayist-self to rest now. Much like the Batman, I'll be back whenever Jalopnik and the auto industry are in need of my services again. Oh, and here's another groundbreaking idea, why don't automakers use these cheap cars to encourage millennial right out of college to work for them? Almost no companies these days have benefits, so why not hire people right on the sales/finance/whatever floor ”I see you're right out of college, and you're looking for a job, and transportation, we're currently hiring for X position, and if you're interested we can give you improved interest rates/lower payments/lower than invoice pricing/whatever as a benefit." Look at how great you are car company. You're employing young college students, you're getting them into cars that they want to be in, you're selling cars, it's a win for everyone (hey, if you use this idea automakers, you should hire me, I'm full of great ideas and millennial common sense).

Personally I'll leave you all with this sickening Scion advert, to which I posted my comments on when it was featured in “ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ” by !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! on Jalopnik, (I also minored in advertising!) Just as a reminder: millennials do not act like this, this does not encourage millennials, or anyone, to buy your car, and I hope those glowing shifter knobs light those cars on fire, did you really think that's something anyone wants, we're twenty-somethings, not tweleve year olds, god damn it.

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DasWauto > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 07:24

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I see you posted this to Oppo but having posted it yesterday, it won't be seen by many people. If you reschedule it to some time today, more people will see it.

Mandy > DasWauto 08/09/2013 at 11:00

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Thanks for the advice, just rescheduled it.

For Sweden > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 11:12

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As you can tell from this picture, I assume, I look something like your average millennial

If so, millennials really need to lift.

Arch Duke Maxyenko, Shit Talk Extraordinaire > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 11:17

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Never, and I mean NEVER apologize for ragging on the Versa. Fuck 'em.

Sparf > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 11:17

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TL;DR, but from what I skimmed it seems like we are in agreement.

I'm a millennial as well (18 years old), but I'm completely uninterested in new cars so that makes me rather uninteresting to automakers.

Anything from the '90s and older is game though.

Mandy > For Sweden 08/09/2013 at 11:21

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This millennial is a hard gainer.

Xesty > For Sweden 08/09/2013 at 11:32

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We don't have time to lift... must... play...video games!

Mosqvich > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 12:08

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I enjoyed this very much. I do have to say your Grandmother, and this is the "old guy" in me talking, probably thought you might live in her home vs selling it to buy a car. But what the heck. My first new car was a 1991 Ford Escort GT, it cost about $11k. In today's dollars that would be $18k. For $18k, I'm not sure you could buy its equivalent (Fiesta ST?). Plus, I only had $10k in loans and I had a job (I did ROTC and went straight into the AF earning about $30k in today's dollars.

The moral of the story? Join the military slacker! ;-)

Mandy > Mosqvich 08/09/2013 at 12:18

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Long story short the house was inherited by my aunt and father. Shortly after my grandmother passed away from cancer, my father passed away from cancer, so the the house was split between my aunt, myself, and my brother. We all talked it over (I live in FL, the house was in NY), and agreed the best option would be to sell it.

Ironically I was slated to join the Army as part of AMEDD (they were going to pay my for me to get my PsyD, in return I serve for eight years), but the place I applied to study wound up in some scandal, so I opted not to go.

My mother is actually an active duty Army MSG, and my father was a retired SFC (they met in the military). My girlfriend's father is an AF Major.

I've always told myself I wouldn't join the military, but I've been thinking about joining the Air Force for the past year, maybe in the IT field, or if I'm fortunate enough as a pilot, since from what I understand they're in dire need of them currently.

Mosqvich > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 13:01

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I'm sorry to hear about your Dad and Grandmother. It sounds like you guys made the only practical decision.

I'm actually in the AF, the reserve now, and have really enjoyed it. I was literally joking about the slacker comment by the way. That's the unfair label Millennials get.

I earned my degree in, wait for it, Russian Studies. To be fair, at the time we were in the Cold War and I actually became a Missile Launch Officer and later worked with the Russians on both the START and Open Skies treaties. My degree actually worked for me for awhile. I don't use it at all these days because I now work for a space research outfit.

You should write more and keep those skill sharp. I hope you join the service. I'm sure you'd do very well. You'd be surprised at how much you've picked up from your parents. My son is a Marine and he's done very well - he wasn't shocked or phased by the training and intensity of basic, etc.. because he'd seen me go through my career enduring stress, etc...

BlazinAce - Doctor of Internal Combustion > Mandy 08/09/2013 at 21:15

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Great write up. Looking at things from this angle, I'm actually surprised automakers don't know how to react to millennials and their "anti-car" ways because what's happening in the US now is the same as what's always happened in Brazil, young people don't have money to buy cars.

While I do see their point when they say that millennials lifes aren't centered on cars the way Baby Boomer's lifes were, it doesn't mean millennials don't want to ever own cars. Brazil has been like that since always, and it still is, with the cheapest cars in the Market still going for ~35 Thousand reais. Used cars aren't really cheap either, so most folks just do without, enthusiast or no. Heck, I wouldn't even have a car now if my father hadn't passed on to me the Fiat Tipo he bought new in 95.

gutenmorgene30 > Mandy 08/10/2013 at 08:52

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Nice write up! Interestingly enough, my brother is about to start his senior year at UM...majoring in psych.

He is a total gearhead, and his car sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the BMW's and porsches that dot the campus. He drives a white EG civic hatch, k20 swap and full race suspension. He might not be the norm amongst millennials when it comes to cars, but he is certainly the next generation of true car lovers.

Good luck with the transition into the real world!

AuburnSpeedster > Mandy 09/11/2013 at 14:18

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In my teenage years, I bought multiple used cars, and made one good one out of it. This is not possible for todays' younger generation.
When I finally made enough money to buy new (1988), I bought a Mustang LX 5.0. I listed my requirements: "V8, Stick shift, FM Radio, everything else is a luxury I probably can't afford". The car was perfect, cost less than half a Toyota Supra Turbo, 25% less than the GM F-body with the 5.7 L, and performed equivalently on the street to both. Ford did a good job, as the car was pretty popular, and they kept cost down by using a 9 year body design (Fox), a 20+ year old engine design (The venerable 302 V8), a transmission shared with GM (the Borg Warner T-5), and an old school design 9-inch rear end, strapped down with a lot of shock absorbers (4 of 'em). All this old school performance was bullet-proof. My Mustang saw the shop less than my buddies Supra, and my other buddies Firebird, no matter how much I pushed it to the limits. It was an amazing "hot Hatch"

I see a lot of this today in the FR-S, the Focus ST, and the SRT Dart.
I don't see it at all in anything GM is building.

The Hot hatch needs to come back..

Tassie Lorenzo > gutenmorgene30 10/06/2015 at 15:06

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“He is a total gearhead, and his car sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the BMW’s and porsches that dot the campus.” What’s wrong with BMWs and Porsches!? :) They are great driver’s cars. A 964 Carrera RS America... just wow.