Gen Z Is Skipping the Driver's License Rite of Passage

For most of the last century, turning sixteen in America came with a single defining ritual: the shaky road test, the trip to the motor vehicle office, the laminated card. According to a review of Federal Highway Administration figures published by WebProNews, the ritual was nearly universal in the eighties — in 1983, nearly half of the country's 16-year-olds held a driver's license. By 2020, the share had shrunk to about a quarter. The driver's license has not vanished, but as a teenage milestone, it is quietly losing its place.

The numbers behind the slide are not really about attitude. In a nationally representative survey of more than a thousand Americans ages 18 to 20, the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that 44 percent were licensed within a year of their state's minimum driving age, 54 percent by their 18th birthday, and 29 percent had still never been licensed when surveyed. The reasons teens gave were practical: more than two in five said they simply did not have a car, 39 percent said they could get around fine without driving, 36 percent blamed the cost of gas, and 35 percent said they just never got around to it, according to the survey's published fact sheet.

The driver's license timeline: 1983 to now

The slide played out over decades. After the 1983 peak, licensing rates drifted downward through the nineties and the two-thousands, even as states built graduated licensing systems that phase young drivers in through supervised practice hours and restrictions on night driving and teen passengers. Those systems worked: after they rolled out across the country, fatal crashes fell 74 percent among 16-year-old drivers, Yale researchers reported in the Journal of Adolescent Health. Yet by the late 2010s, the share of high school seniors holding a license had slipped from 81 percent in 2006 to 72 percent a decade later, and researchers estimated that roughly seven in ten eligible adolescents were putting off licensure by a year or more.

Then came a twist. Newer research from the foundation found the trend reversing: 60.3 percent of teens now get licensed before their 18th birthday, an 11 percent increase since 2012, and 40.8 percent are licensed at or before age 16. According to the AAA newsroom's 2023 report on the reversal, the bounce-back owes something to the economy — back in 2012, many families still emerging from recession said they simply could not afford another driver.

Where you live changes everything

The national average hides a sharp geographic split. The same AAA research found that 49.8 percent of teens in large cities were licensed before their 18th birthday, compared with nearly two-thirds of those in less urbanized areas. Midwestern teens were the quickest to pick up a driver's license, with 70 percent licensed before adulthood and 55 percent licensed by age 16, while only 22 percent of teens in the Northeast were licensed by 16.

Money and background matter as much as geography. In the foundation's earlier survey, just 25 percent of teens from households earning under twenty thousand dollars a year were licensed by 18, against 79 percent from households above one hundred thousand. The Yale study found the same pattern along racial and economic lines: Latino teens were 4.5 times as likely as white teens to delay licensure by more than two years, Black teens 2.3 times as likely, and teens from poor families 4.4 times as likely as those from affluent ones.

What waiting costs — and what it saves

Delaying a driver's license is not free. Graduated licensing protections generally stop applying once a driver turns 18, so teens who wait miss the supervised practice, night-driving limits, and passenger restrictions that cut crash rates. Lead researcher Federico Vaca warns that young people who first start driving in their early twenties face a more complicated world, with more exposure to alcohol and other crash risks, and notes that some who delay also lose out on jobs and schooling opportunities that require a car. His suggested fix borrows from Australia and the United Kingdom, where graduated restrictions apply to novice drivers of all ages.

Others read the same data as a story about access, not attitude. Among young adults who waited until 18 or later to get licensed, 68.4 percent said they had been nervous about driving, 52.6 percent said they could do everything they needed without a car, 33.3 percent said driving cost too much, and 28.9 percent said they were simply too busy. When the top reasons are not having a car and not being able to afford one, the delay looks less like a cultural rejection of driving and more like economics doing the steering.

The 16th-birthday trip to the motor vehicle office is not dead — the rebound in the data shows the driver's license still matters when families can swing it. But its meaning has changed, from an automatic rite of passage into a calculation about money, geography, and need. For more on how young Americans are navigating real-world milestones, see our IRL Life coverage. And for a very different story about life behind the wheel — an 81-year-old delivery driver whose viral fundraiser fell apart — read our report on the Donald Johnson campaign.