Driver's licenses aren't a rite of passage anymore
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As a mom of three kids, Christina Mott had been counting the days until her oldest son, Colton, got his driver's license.
It falls on her to drive each of them — age 10, 12, and 16 — to three different charter schools every day, and then to extracurriculars and social outings. "Having him able to drive himself would free up a lot of time," she says. If only.
While out one day on his learner's permit, Colton rolled through a red light and a stop sign. He panicked and decided to put his license on hold indefinitely. "Getting in crashes, that's something that scares me a lot," Colton explains.
That means his mom is still chauffeuring three kids around their Northern California suburb. Christina, who's 46, says a lot of her fellow parents are going through the same thing: Teenagers are slamming the brakes on the time-honored rite of passage of getting a license at 16, either out of fear or because they're put off by the process or the costs. And that means a lot of Gen X parents are stuck behind the wheel longer than they bargained for.
"When I was 16, we didn't think this way about driving at all. Driving meant freedom!" Christina says.
"I don't know about you, but did you get a license the minute you could drive? It was a goal in life."Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO
Even so, she admits Colton doesn't feel quite as ready for a license as she was at 16. "He's not very observant and tends to live in his own world," she says. "I don't think, without GPS, that he would even know how to get to the grocery store from our house that we've lived in for eight years. So, the idea of him dealing with traffic lights and other drivers makes me nervous, too."
In 1983, roughly half of US 16-year-olds had a driver's license. That number fell to 25% in 2022, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. Most teens will eventually get their licenses, the data shows — they're just waiting a lot longer.
Even Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber — a beneficiary of the Delayed Driver trend — says it's caught him off guard. In an interview on the Verge's "Decoder" podcast last May, Khosrowshahi revealed he'd been struggling to convince his 18-year-old son to get a license.
"It drives me crazy," Khosrowshahi said. "I don't know about you, but did you get a license the minute you could drive? It was just such a thing. It was a goal in life. It represented freedom."
Delayed Driving goes hand in hand with a broader trend: Gen Z is falling behind older generations across a range of social markers. They're having less sex and waiting longer to couple off and start families. They don't go out as much and drink less alcohol, in part because it's so easy to socialize, shop, and order meals online.
"If you think of why those 16-year-olds — 30 or 50 years ago — were so eager to get their license, a lot of it had to do with wanting to drink and have sex," says Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor of psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts and author of "Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties."
That's still the case — Gen Z is just slowing down the march into adulthood.
Gen X parents are still chauffeuring kids who are old enough to drive. "It becomes 'rock, paper, scissors' as far as who's going to take who to whose house," says one mom of a 17-year-old.
Add to that the convenience of rideshare apps like Uber and the promise of self-driving cars, and the urgency of getting a license has diminished. "They don't see their future as necessarily involving a car," Arnett said. He believes the trend will be a boon for autonomous vehicles.
The situation has sent a lot of Gen X parents to online forums like Reddit to complain that they're "chauffeuring kids old enough to drive themselves." One described her kid as a "21-year-old passenger prince."
Rather than teenagers begging their parents to let them drive, more parents are the ones doing the begging.
"It's almost like pushing him off the cliff," Giselle Rodriguez Greenwood, who lives in the suburbs of Houston, says of her 17-year-old son's resistance to getting a license.
It's the same for his classmates, nearly all of whom still depend on their parents or their friends' parents to get them around. "It becomes 'rock, paper, scissors' as far as who's going to take who to whose house," Greenwood says. "We have a text thread of lacrosse parents, and that's where we make the plea for help."
Like Mott, Greenwood is not unsympathetic to her teen's reluctance. Houston is consistently ranked among the most unsafe cities for driving. She wonders if she's more of a helicopter parent than she realizes. "Sometimes, I fear I may have imparted my fears on him," she says.
Indeed, a lot of parents worry about pushing their teens to drive before they're ready — or have a handle on their screen use. A 2025 study by Mass General Brigham found that teenage drivers spent about 21% of car rides glancing at their phones, and about 26% of those glances lasted 2 seconds or longer. Even if they put their phones away, growing up with screens can change how Gen Zers navigate the road.
Still, driving is an essential skill, and Greenwood plans to take a harder line with her younger son, who's 14. "I'm just throwing him behind the wheel as soon as he can," she says. "I'm not doing this again."
Even a strong parental nudge isn't always enough to get a kid to the DMV. When Sarah Wilson, a mother of three in Nashville, stopped offering to ferry her 16-year-old around town, her daughter didn't sign up for driver's ed; she started taking the bus. She's now in college, and still doesn't know how to drive. She gets around mostly on her bike or by catching a ride with friends.
"It becomes frustrating when she can't help with long drives or simple errands," says Wilson, who's 50. "It's a form of independence I want her to have, even if she's been slow to claim it."
Robert Roble, a Lyft driver in Auburn, Georgia, a small city 42 miles from Atlanta, has noticed an uptick in the number of driving-age teens requesting rides to afterschool jobs, sports practice, or the mall. "I had a 22-year-old this week that hadn't gotten his driver's license yet," says Roble, who's 59.
Both Lyft and Uber have reported that fewer Gen Z drivers have translated to more business for rideshare companies. "The data shows that most 16-year-olds, at this point, are not that interested in a driver's license," Uber president Andrew Macdonald said in a recent interview.
It's really hard to force a 16-year-old to do things. It's not like he's going out all the time, and I can ground him.
For some families, even the occasional rideshare surge pricing makes more financial sense when you account for the combined costs of driving school, an extra car, and the price of gas.
The cost of a used car has soared in recent years, thanks in part to tariffs and supply chain slowdowns, as have monthly auto insurance premiums. Meanwhile, fewer public schools offer free driver's ed programs, the global research firm IBISWorld reported last year, adding to the logistical and financial hurdles of getting a driver's license.
In a few states, including New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, licensed teenagers are limited to how many friends they can pick up in their cars. In California, for example, a teenager under 18 has to wait a year before they can carpool with all their friends. The law prohibits having anyone under 20 in their car without an adult over 25 present. "With that restriction, it takes a lot of the fun out of it," says Colton, the Northern California teen.
Nina McCollum, who lives in Ohio, says cost was a factor in her 16-year-old son not immediately getting his license. The state requires formal driver's education to apply for a license, and McCollum was hit with sticker shock when she looked into it. "The cheapest I've found from a reputable provider is like $700," says McCollum, who's 57.
The family decided to delay the classes for a few months, and McCollum has been giving her son informal lessons in the meantime.
What has surprised her is that it often feels like it's her — rather than her teenager — who's antsy for him to drive. None of her son's close friends have licenses, even though they're old enough; they're all dependent on their parents to drive them to band practice and basketball games.
"It's really hard to force a 16-year-old to do things," she says. "It's not like he's going out all the time, and I can ground him."
The lack of enthusiasm to drive doesn't change the fact that most of America is heavily car-dependent. More than 9 in 10 households have at least one car, and 87% of people drive every day.
Unless you live in a few walkable US cities with solid mass transit, not driving means relying on other people for carpools, timing your outings to bus schedules, spending a lot on Taxis and rideshares, or walking in areas simply not built for it.
For years, that's how Alma Benitez got by. "Since I come from a first-gen household, the mentality is that the man is a provider and is always able to drive you around," says Benitez, who's now 24. As a license-less teen, she relied on her dad and brother for rides; otherwise, she walked or took public transportation in White Plains, New York.
Ultimately, it held her back. "Because I didn't drive, most of my jobs and school locations would have to be a commutable walk or bus transportation ride," she said. "So it kind of limited me."
She finally got her license three years ago, when she was 21. Benitez now makes TikToks for new drivers, offering instructions for how to pump gas or make smooth turns. Most of the comments under her videos are from people in their late 20s. "A lot of people are really scared to get on the road," she says.
Back in California, Colton Mott is trying to win back his confidence about driving. He's again taking driving lessons and has an appointment for his test at his local DMV. His mom signed him up for both.
"I feel really good about him driving again," she says. "He's been asking to drive every day."
Julia Pugachevsky is a senior health reporter on Business Insider's health team.