“In the past, if you wanted to date someone, you couldn’t ask her out if you didn’t have a car,” Toyoda, 57, told a packed auditorium of about 900 Meiji University students in Tokyo on Sept. 26. “It’s all changed now. Money goes on monthly phone bills. Also, parking’s expensive and it’s easy to get around Tokyo on public transport.”
Though he’s kidding about the dating, the underlying theme is no joke.
“Younger Japanese are quite different from the older Japanese and cars mean much less to many than 20 or 25 years ago,” said Edwin Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research Corp. in Tokyo, who’s been in Japan since the 1970s. “They’re more interested in tech gadgets, like the iPhone. Young people nowadays don’t have the money to buy cars too.”
If more Japanese youths are like Keiko Kato, Toyoda may find kids will be kids and won’t always share the values of the older generation. Kato was one of three students who said after the talk that they still couldn’t see the need to own a car.
“If someone gave me 100,000 yen ($1,000) a month to spend on whatever I wanted, I don’t think I’d save for a car,” said Kato, 19. “I’d rather spend it on something practical like a fridge, microwave, or pretty furniture.”
Bloomberg via Instapundit
16 comments:
That's just sad for those boys. All the spirit and sense of adventure of a garden slug. I have to admit that I respect the attitude of a gang banger over that.
Paradise by the Iphone light~~~
Just shoot me.
I've been driving for 4 decades, and before that used a bicycle, and my whole life I've been riding or driving nearly every single day. When I'm with friends, I'm always the one driving. Despite all those thousands of hours of driving it's still one of my favorite things.
Everyday I drive east on the freeway 14 miles to work (15 minutes). At the off ramp near work, I always ask myself: should I turn or just keep driving straight out to the mountains with the woods, and lakes and trails; or even past that into the Mohave desert with it's wide vistas, multicolored layer cakes, hypnotic stretches of road, and ghost towns. It's always very tempting, and not for the destinations so much as the driving to them and through them. The quest to go somewhere, to be moving through it.
I'm never bored when driving, and my mind seems to go free form thinking about all kinds of things I haven't had the time to before.
If I'm alone, I have a burning desire to not be, to have someone to share my joy of moving and seeing and traveling from here to someplace else that's unknown at the moment, like the courses in a highly anticipated meal where you know the cook is very talented, but have no idea what he'll bring next.
I never want to give that up. And wow, all the great times I've had with friends in cars. I can't imagine my life without them.
Kids today grew told car fumes were killing the planet.
I have seen this attitude up close. My neighbors had to drag their son to the DMV to get a license. My own nephew is showing no interest in driving a car at age when his grandfather used to drive cars in sanctioned races.
Where I live, this isn't an issue of "public transportation is better"; because it is not. If you want to catch a bus from my neighborhood, you have a few miles to walk before you find a stop.
I have made several trips to London recently, and I will say I have desire to drive a car around there. I can get anywhere I want to be in a reasonable time using public transportation. I'm sure that's true for most major cities like Tokyo and New York as well. In addition, as Mr. Toyoda himself notes, parking is expensive in those cities.
Yeah - there are certain cities where public transport, taxis and walking are preferable to a car.
Out west, you must have a car.
I couldn't function without a car.
Mr. Toyota is lucky America is vast and open.
@Bagoh - that was beautiful.
Cars aren't for getting across town, although they do that, and they can do it with a ton stuff you might not want to carry on your back, like your kids.
I enjoy a bus ride, or a train ride now and then. It's great to not have to park or think about driving in town, and it's best for going to an event like a concert, but I feel helpless, dependent, almost useless like that. I need some stranger's help just to leave from where I am, or to get home, and I can't go anywhere unless he is going there too, and I must go when he wants to.
For me, without my truck, there would be no hiking, hang gliding, or exploring anything beyond the most beaten of city streets. There would be no dog rescue, or taking my dogs with me, or building things that require tools and materials. There would be no driving here and there to collect things I need for a project or to meet with people in person around town to see what they are doing. There would be very little of my life left without my truck.
And the CEO of Toyota is named "Toyoda"? Was he manufactured for the job?
(1) The youth of Japan have forgotten the advantages of having a radiation shield readily at hand.
(2) YouTube is blocked for me so I'm just guessing, here. But perhaps THIS will get you where you want to go.
I ride my bike and chain it up in the handicapped space.
I did not know steering wheels are on the left in Germany.
1) "Keiko" is a woman's name. Couldn't they find an actual "herbivore youth" to quote for their lets-bash-on-young-Japanese-men article?
2) This is a *Tokyo crowd* we're talking about. Tokyo is like Manhattan on steroids when it comes to cars and getting around. Autos for Tokyo kids being an expensive hobby thing isn't particularly *new*.
You have to be a millionaire to own a car if you live in Bloombergistan.
Yea, I wouldn't own a car in Tokyo or Manhattan, but that's a good reason not to live there. A giant prison.
My husband is studying Japanese and it all exited about living and working there some day (or at least visiting!) and he's been watching all the Japanese culture stuff he can find.
He told me that there are no old cars in Japan. You buy a new car and you have a government fee that *goes up* every year, so most people don't keep a car for very many years. To get rid of a car (so you can buy a brand new one with a lower government fee) you have to PAY a significant fee to have it taken apart by people who do nothing but take every little bit apart so that it can all be recycled. According to him people will abandon nearly new cars in vacant lots.
I'd call shenanigans but this is, after all, the country where you don't buy used houses either. You buy a lot and if it has a house on it, you tear down the old house and build a new one.
I suspect, if there is any truth at all to the escalating government fees on cars and impossibility of buying used or just keeping your car for 20 years... that the Toyota CEO was all for the government policies and laws that would encourage people to buy a new car every few years and to always buy from Toyoda instead of buying a used car from a re-seller or a person.
With that name Nissan wouldn't have him, Honda wouldn't have him and Subaru wouldn't have him; but the minute he walked through the door Toyoda was named Toyota CEO.
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