Employed 16 year old here who has intentionally chosen not to buy a car. My job is three miles away, it's healthier to walk, and my other work is all remote. I'm using the money I could have spent buying/maintaining a car to travel Europe with my two best friends next summer.

Employment doesn't require a car, even for teens.

An even smarter kid, realizes already that for cash flow, you don't really have to leave the house. Smartphone (and iPad or PC) wins again.

Someone smarter than that would get the car and sell it for way more than it costs to buy a smartphone.

47% of the population of San Francisco uses something other than a car to get to work. In big cities, a car is not needed to get a well paying job. The really smart kids realize this.

'kids today'[1] have quite a lot of representation outside the concentrated city centre - usually city centres have a higher-than-average age. Cool, SF is tiny, compact, and riddled with public transport. Now travel down the coast a bit to greater LA, 20 million people of which have poor access to public transport and live in a very spread out city, limiting the utility of getting around via musclepower. Rinse, repeat anywhere you have spread-out suburbia with poor PT, or outside cities altogether..

[1] article's chosen demographic, though it doesn't really matter