Be careful not to extrapolate future trends too much based on what "kids these days" are doing right now. Cars are tools, and when the only task you have to complete is "get to school or work, get home, occasionally get to your girlfriend's place" a car that gets you from A to B without much trouble is fine. But a lot of "kids these days" will eventually grow into parents, and they'll have different use cases and therefore need more versatile tools. A 2-seater no longer works when you have 3 kids, or when you have to haul things bigger than a person for work or your own projects. A simple city-commute-optimized car with a short range no longer works when you occasionally want to visit your parents 2 states over, your brother 3 states over, and your wife's parents in a small town that's inconveniently far from any airport. When "kids these days" grow up, they may discover use cases they'd never considered before.
How often do you visit your parents 2 states over, or your parents-in-law who live far away from any airport?
Sure, "kids these days" will soon grow up and figure out what they need to get to those places. But the answer might not be "Buy a minivan." It could just as well be "Use this app to rent a self-driving minivan."
Having 3 kids, of course, is a different problem, but a lot of it depends on where you live. I have a hunch that many "kids these days" would hate to live in the same boring suburbs that their parents raised them in. And who knows, maybe Americans will finally rediscover the courage to tell their kids to take the subway to soccer.
my parents are nearby, but my wife's parents are about 500 miles away, and we visit several times per year. We'd like to visit more often, but have also had multiple funerals this year that have taken us in the other direction.
I'm not suggesting everyone will necessarily own a car. Only that extrapolating from the trends of what young people are currently doing isn't necessarily accurate -- recently graduated singles won't have all of the same life considerations as they will 5-10 years in the future. (Another one: those "boring suburbs" often have much better schools than the "hip" inner city. When you have kids, bad schools become a serious consideration.)
