When I was in high school, my parents did what any sensible family living in the District of Columbia did in the 80s: they fled to the suburbs.  In a city where you couldn’t even guarantee the picking up of dead bodies, let alone the picking up of the trash, the promise of a remotely satisfactory education for one’s young went unfulfilled by a mayor too busy smoking crack to care.  But in the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery County, mother and father could rest assured that his or her child would learn to sing their ABCs, not how to sling hash.
Not that Silver Spring is by any means the hinterlands.  Close enough in that DC still formed the incorporated boundary to the south and east, the rather largish city still fits the definition of “suburb” to a proverbial T, providing easy access to the District via Washington’s surprisingly competent Metro system.  And if you insisted on driving into and out of town, New Hampshire Avenue provided a direct connection from the apartment building into which my family nestled and downtown’s famed Dupont Circle.
But, go west young man, and that’s where the real magic lay.  Whereas turning right out of The Point Apartment Community brought one into the city, a left shot you past the high school where I labored through my teenage years and a last-chance McDonald’s before the Avenue narrowed from six lanes to two, changing suddenly from a suburb-to-city connector into a veritable paved cow path.  Following the road as it turned north, one could find themselves halfway to Pennsylvania Dutch Country if they got lost in the sheer fun of taking on mile after mile of twists, turns and the occasional rollicking hill that defied both gravity and the butter-soft suspension tuning on my parents’ 1984 Ford Tempo.
Flash forward 20 something years, and those farms and fields that once dominated the landscape beyond the suburban haven where Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” have been bulldozed to make way for…more suburbs.   Miles and miles, in fact, stretching so far northward they now meet the suburbs encroaching south from Baltimore.  What once was pretty two-lane country roads winding fast through fields has now been widened and flattened into divided roads connecting peculiarly-named housing developments and identical-styled red brick shopping centers dominated by grocery stores and Targets.
And with it all comes traffic.  Lots and lots and lots of traffic.  As thousands of other families have followed my parents’ lead and made the trek to the ‘burbs, suburbs have been displaced by exurbs, and exurbs by places without names that truly are the hinterlands, well beyond the reach of public transportation or even the ease of walking.  Living in these places, a car becomes not a joy, nor an expression of freedom, but truly an appliance, something that sits just above the proverbial toaster to which midsize sedans are often compared in the pantheon of personal property.
Thanks to JD Power, we now know that today’s teen living in the suburbs isn’t anywhere near as enamored with the automobile as we were at their age.
Really now?  You don’t say.
Enthusiasts like to blame this sad state the bogus idea that today’s cars aren’t as exciting or interesting as they once were.  But that’s hogwash—what in God’s name was interesting about cars like the best-selling Ford Tempo, or the Ford Fairmont that preceded it, other than perhaps finding a peculiar example that was able to reach 50,000 miles without a breakdown?  Even supposedly “interesting” cars like the Chevrolet Corvette, which wheezed almost 200 hp out of its 5.7-L V8 through a lifeless 3-speed automatic in 1982, seem relatively dull next to a 2010 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V, which is possibly the least-interesting modern sport compact going.  More than a few automakers managed to go a full decade from 1974 on without building one single automobile that wasn’t an utter piece of shit.  If you’re reading this, then face it: chances are you grew up with some of the dullest garbage to ever come on four wheels.

JD Power has a different take.  They say that, thanks to Facebook and iPhones, kids don’t need cars anymore, because they can get everything they need through the Internet.  Now I know kids today probably know a thing or two more about this World Wide Web do-hickey than I do, but at the same time, I suspect that just like I was at that age, they’re also still a raging ball of hormones when they’re entering their driving years.  And last I checked, you still couldn’t do that online.
The reality today is that driving sucks.  Don’t believe me?  Try going home from your 9-5er and then say it.  Where’s the thrill in crawling along at 15 miles per hour, watching some douche cut you off by coming around the shoulder, the same douche who cut you off by coming around the shoulder yesterday?  Yeah, you know the guy.  That’s the highlight of your drive home—throwing some asshole in a Prius your middle finger.
Now imagine your average teen in the backseat looking up long enough from his or her netbook to watch this daily ritual.  Are they really supposed to be excited about getting a driver’s license…for this?  Most of us aren’t enthralled any more by the spectacle of putting up with a car on a daily basis—why should they want to?
This is where a word that many kids know and many parents don’t—“sustainability”—comes in.  The model we’ve built, rings and rings (and rings) of suburbs, connected only by our own private conveyances, is unsustainable.  The Eisenhower Interstate system that connected the US and taught Americans the thrill of the open road has also brought about snarling sprawl that has converted our dreams into nightmares.
Companies like Toyota and General Motors believe that tomorrow’s hybrids and extended-range electric cars will re-engage youth into becoming automotive aficionados the way import hot hatches made us love the automobile, the way muscle cars excited our fathers before that.  But the best, cleanest, most enticing new car in the world won’t make new enthusiasts of this next generation as long as we’re facing a situation of suburban snarl and broken roads.