The young Americans choosing Y2K cars over shiny new SUVs: ‘I get so much crap from people’

People under 35 are hunting for no-frills rides they can pay for in cash and fix themselves – defying expectations to take on steep loans

J ack Price joined the marines in fall 2021 knowing he would need a car to get around base and that he couldn’t afford a new one. A joyless, month-long search through dealer classifieds and Facebook Marketplace listings ended when his mother spotted a 2010 Volkswagen Jetta posted on her office listserv by a co-worker moving abroad. With just 60,000 miles (96,560km) on the meter, the car (a manual!) was mechanically sound, and the air conditioning, sunroof and Bluetooth radio worked too. At $6,000, it was a steal. Price paid in cash.

Five years on, the Jetta, which he called the Pewter Pebble, is still carting him from A to B in unassuming style. “I’ve completely driven it into the ground,” says the 30-year-old, who lives in Los Angeles. “All over bases, cross-country a couple times, not really lovingly. I get so much crap from people, but not people my age.”

For generations, buying a first new car has been a rite of passage in the US, the clearest sign of a young person responsibly striking out on their own. But younger millennials and gen Z are increasingly finding that path blocked. The average new vehicle costs more than $50,000, an alarming figure that reflects Americans’ insatiable appetite for progressively larger SUVs and pickups. Meanwhile, adults under 35 are disappearing from showroom floors, accounting for less than 10% of new vehicle registrations in 2024 – a new low.

According to the credit reporting agency Experian, the average monthly car payment in the US is $765 for a new car and $542 for a used one, with the loan terms now stretching to six, even seven, years. A record 21% of new-car buyers pay $1,000 or more a month , according to the autos research group Edmunds. And that’s before factoring in maintenance, fluctuating gas prices and the eye-watering insurance premiums often charged to drivers under 35.

For many young Americans already under the strain of student loans, high housing costs and an unforgiving labor market, buying a new car or even a newer used one is out of the question. Enter the Y2K car – the retro ride that has become a trendy romantic choice for some younger Americans. “There’s definitely a golden era of cars from the late 90s and early 2000s that people just really want all of a sudden,” says Charlie Spears, a service adviser at an independently owned repair shop in Atlanta who conducts prepurchase inspections of used cars on demand. “A lot of people just want something that’s not going to fail them.”

Y2K cars don’t encompass everything produced in that era. They are the ones that simply won’t die. Think wedge-shaped Honda Accords and slab-sided Toyota Camrys: dependable, hand-me-down transport that can last 150,000 miles or more with routine maintenance. (Price’s Jetta, which was built at the end of a model production run that began in 2005, just makes the cut.) They’re economical to run and relatively inexpensive to insure, owing to their drastically lower worth. Best of all, the purchase price is low enough to pay in cash. Even when buyers need a loan – at steep interest rates as modern cars have in effect become mortgage payments on wheels – they can pay it off in a fraction of the time it takes to finance a newer car.

The supply of these bargains is dwindling: used vehicles priced under $15,000, the sweet spot for Y2K cars, have shrunk from 21% of inventory a year ago to 15% , according to industry analysis from Cox Automotive – numbers that speak to the demand for affordable cars. “Part of the draw is the nostalgia factor – people wanting cars they grew up with,” says Consumer Reports’ autos expert Keith Barry. “An old car with the right music on is kind of the closest thing to a time machine.”

On social media, the Y2K car has emerged as an ironic status symbol – a marker of maturity, grit and lack of pretense. Defects – busted aircon, glitchy windows, bits and bobs that have failed, fallen off or been held on with gaffer tape – are simply treated as part of a Y2K car’s personality. “I don’t know what kind of disease that is in the brain,” says one TikTok creator, who has to pry open the fuel door of her 2003 Mitsubishi Outlander with a screwdriver . “But I don’t get frustrated. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is fun.’”

In a Y2K car that takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’, creature comforts are beside the point. For many, part of the appeal is the absence of dashboard infotainment displays and other screens that have replaced basic switches and knobs in newer cars, often in the name of cost-cutting. Automakers’ zeal to monetize in-car technology, sometimes charging extra to activate physically installed features such as heated seats and remote start, only reinforces young buyers’ doubts about the value of a new car.

At the same time, do-it-yourself repairs have become harder as cars grow more digitally complex and auto manufacturers cut off access to owners and even independent mechanics . Oftentimes, they require investing in specialty digital readers or computer software to diagnose problems, and bespoke tools for wrenching. Most car owners would sooner punt, take the car to the dealership and pay whatever the maintenance and repair costs – which, of course, is exactly the vertical integration that shareholder-bound manufacturers are after.

Hence the romance with Y2K cars: you can fix ’em yourself, their old-school controls fall easily to hand, they’re tried and tested, seemingly built to last. They just have an aura of invincibility – never mind that their age makes them fundamentally more dangerous and susceptible to frequent repairs. “I’ve used my Jetta as if it were a truck,” Price says. “Transported trees in it, put my surfboard through the sunroof. I’ve done every single thing possible to thrash it beyond its abilities.”

Price’s passengers, however, don’t have much appreciation for Pewter Pebble’s quirks. Often while carpooling to US military installations, senior officers compelled to hold up the sagging headliner would ask him when he was trading in his beater for a new truck or SUV. It was a similar story when Price left the military last year and started chauffeuring Alex Vindman, the Iraq war veteran turned US Senate hopeful, on the campaign trail during Florida’s special election. “I drove him around a couple times in it, and he was like, ‘ What is going on?’” Price says. Generally speaking, he says, “the fact that we expect folks who are getting paid, like, a grand a month to have a new car is nuts.”

T wenty-five miles north-west of downtown Atlanta, a half hour’s drive in optimistic traffic, sits Town Center at Cobb, a typical suburban mall in recession. But on the first Sunday of every month, the mall parking comes alive for Caffeine and Octane, a sprawling car show that’s open to the public, free to attend and also has long lines for coffee and donut trucks. And even though the usual turnout of 2,000-plus cars was winnowed down to a few hundred on the gray, showery morning of October’s show, it was still an impressive array of vintage American muscle, Japanese domestic market (or JDM) unicorns and multimillion-dollar exotics. The Y2K cars stood out, too.

Sitting right at the entrance of the show was Anthony DeNaples’s 2000 Buick Regal GS, a sleeper sedan that has become a cult classic. He bought it four months ago for $18,000 on Facebook Marketplace, a price he considered a bargain for such a rare commuter. “Person didn’t really know what they had,” says the 37-year-old custom car builder, who uses the car to ferry his two young daughters. His oldest is constantly goading him to do burnouts, which she calls “making stripes”. Modern cars, he reasons, have become so laden with safety systems – for keeping the car in lane, or slamming on the brakes when sensors detect an obstacle – that they’re less fun to drive hard. “A lot of newer cars, if you want to drive it how it’s meant to be driven, you’ve gotta shut off all these things, and a lot of times it doesn’t completely shut off.”