I don’t see how that changes my point. In Italy you need to be 18 before applying for a driving licence, so the fact that younger people don’t drive doesn’t mean much. Many teenagers ride scooters that their parents buy them, and a small, second-hand car isn’t much more expensive, so I guess they’d drive their parents’ car if they were legally allowed to.
Italy is incomparable in many ways to the USA; discussion of trends in the USA do not easily generalize to Italy, so I don’t really care about Italian scooters. My points were about the USA, and I believe they remain valid about the USA; and given the predominance of the USA in technological matters, the USA’s regulation and trends will matter most to the development of autonomous cars.
AFAIK the US is wealthier than Italy, so, if anything, I’d expect American adults to be more willing to buy cars to their children than Italian adults are. Am I missing something? (Probably, given that I’ve never been to the US; but what, exactly?)
Maybe cars cost more here. Maybe insurance costs more.
Wouldn’t that make it less likely for teenagers to buy their own cars, rather than more?
(Maybe I wasn’t clear. What I meant by “overwhelming exception” in the great^n-grandparent is that I’d guess that most of the teenagers who drive cars already are the ones who were bought cars by their parents. Were you implying that in the US until now there have been a large fraction of teenagers who buy their own cars?)
I was explicitly talking about teenagers.
I don’t see how that changes my point. In Italy you need to be 18 before applying for a driving licence, so the fact that younger people don’t drive doesn’t mean much. Many teenagers ride scooters that their parents buy them, and a small, second-hand car isn’t much more expensive, so I guess they’d drive their parents’ car if they were legally allowed to.
Italy is incomparable in many ways to the USA; discussion of trends in the USA do not easily generalize to Italy, so I don’t really care about Italian scooters. My points were about the USA, and I believe they remain valid about the USA; and given the predominance of the USA in technological matters, the USA’s regulation and trends will matter most to the development of autonomous cars.
AFAIK the US is wealthier than Italy, so, if anything, I’d expect American adults to be more willing to buy cars to their children than Italian adults are. Am I missing something? (Probably, given that I’ve never been to the US; but what, exactly?)
Maybe cars cost more here. Maybe insurance costs more. Maybe the culture frowns on scooters as replacements. Maybe a million things.
Wouldn’t that make it less likely for teenagers to buy their own cars, rather than more?
(Maybe I wasn’t clear. What I meant by “overwhelming exception” in the great^n-grandparent is that I’d guess that most of the teenagers who drive cars already are the ones who were bought cars by their parents. Were you implying that in the US until now there have been a large fraction of teenagers who buy their own cars?)
Yes. As far as I can tell, decades ago it was a lot more common for teenagers to buy cars, assisted by part-time jobs.