Whether or Not Millennials Are Buying Cars Is Beside the Point

The ongoing discussion about Millennial car interest has been treated, rather strangely, as a zero sum game—as if anyone either always drives or never drives, with no behavior in between. So we get a somewhat unnecessary mea culpa from The Atlantic's Derek Thompson, whose fine past reporting has revealed key shifts in how young people feel about driving, upon discovering that some of them are actually buying cars. Citing data from J.D. Power, Thompson shows us that vehicle sales among Gen Y (here, meaning Millennials) have eclipsed those of Gen X:

The appropriate rebuttal from Joe Cortright at City Observatory is that of course Millennials buy a lot of cars—there's a lot of Millennials. Using Census data and previous J.D. Power measures, Cortright determines that once you account for generation size, Millennials "are buying new cars at a rate far lower than older generations." By his math, Gen Y buys 47.5 cars per 1,000 people, whereas Gen X buys 73.7 per 1,000, and Boomers buy 63.5 per 1,000.