Remove the barriers to ownership and the appeal of driving and cars is as strong as ever It’s a popular refrain to suggest that young people are falling out of love with cars. As evidence, it’s noted that throughout much of the developed world, the proportion of young people learning to drive is down over the past two decades. Well, the stats can say that, but I’m not buying what’s inferred from them. Granted, if much of your life is spent on a Lime bike, driving would interrupt your phone use, and if your home city introduces a congestion charge despite 74% of its residents thinking it would have a negative impact (slow hand clap, once again, for Oxfordshire County Council), I can see why you wouldn’t bother with driving. But that isn’t the same thing as falling out of love with cars; it’s car use and car ownership becoming too expensive and difficult. What happens if you remove the barriers to driving and car ownership? It seems to me that the appeal of driving and cars is as strong as ever. A case study in point: the professional footballer. (You should note this isn’t a column about football; I like the game but I realise you might not.) Now and again a social media algorithm will decide that what I’d like to watch next is top-tier footballers arriving at their training grounds. Now, if there is a group of people who don’t need to have an interest in cars and driving, this is it. They are the people who least need an interest in motoring. For one, they already have a hobby. You know how you and I devoured everything about motoring in our youth? How we spent our younger lives thinking about little else? These people did that with football. There are only so many hours in a day, and their respective interests in the game turned out to be so all-consuming that they now get paid at least £5 million a year for being so obsessed with it. The time they had and still have to invest in an interest in cars is therefore relatively small. And it’s not like they need to drive. In their leisure time, they have no requirement to cruise around in a modified Vauxhall Corsa of an evening in the hope it will help them get laid. And, for work, it would be better if they actively avoided driving. I’m no physiotherapist, but I know that driving isn’t inherently good for the body. My occasional physical therapy says as much. If you could have a comfortable chair, like, say, the one in the back of a Mercedes-Benz V-Class that your employer would gladly have waiting outside your house every morning, or a slightly less comfortable one, like the driving seat of a Mercedes-Benz G-Class , the chauffeured option would be better. It would also be safer, more secure. Cost is not an object for elite footballers, and one suspects their employers would prefer it. And yet here these young people come, average age mid-twenties, arriving for training, each one of them (except for the ones whose licence has been confiscated) behind the wheel of their own car. It might not be an enthusiast’s car in the sense that you and I know it, but it will be a car for those who like cars. Maybe a Lamborghini , Audi or Mercedes SUV of some level of ghastliness – a car chosen with a level of care and interest and certainly not something a buyer would alight on if they actively disliked or had no interest in cars. The short of it is, then, that freed from the limitations that many young people face these days, they will have a car and drive it themselves if they can, even if they don’t need to and even if it would be actively better for them if they didn’t. The allure of driving, of cars, of freedom, of independence, of owning something that says something about you still exists. The stats may say that a smaller proportion of young people are learning to drive, or becoming car owners, but extrapolating that to suggest young people don’t like cars is like believing they don’t like owning houses or having Caribbean holidays or getting free university education. Not having it is not the same as not liking it.