Confession #43: Acura and Buick's new small cars are Millennial-chasers, but Baby Boomers will be doing the driving

2013 Acura ILX (Photo: Wikimedia/IFCAR)

A day doesn't go by when I don't come across some story about automakers dying to appeal to so-called Millennials, or the twentysomething crowd infatuated with Facebook and iPhones.

That's fine and whatever, but designers and product planners think it's a good idea to incorporate elements of these things into new cars, especially those they want to sell to people of my demographic (well, those of us who are gainfully employed). I like the ability to connect my iPhone through Bluetooth and Internet radio steaming through the speakers is cool. But I do not want to update my Facebook status while driving, or post something witty to Twitter. Product planners of the auto industry, listen up: that's not going to get more Millennials to buy your cars.

What might work is if these entry-level "premium" cars they're pitching didn't look like they're made for our parents. The latest case comes from Acura, in the form of the totally shrug-inducing ILX sedan.

Confession #19: Most people my age couldn't care less about cars

I’ve known something was wrong for a few years now. I felt like a car addiction was something to be closeted because people would start squirming away from me.

And if I met “Mad Men’s” Vincent Kartheiser in a bar and started talking to him about turbochargers and Mercedes’ new AMG models, his eyes might roll back into his skull.

This means I wasn’t at all surprised by a recent report suggesting my generation, the Millennials – those born roughly between 1980 and 1995 – have dwindling interest in the car.

For automakers, especially the Detroit Three, this is damning information. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler already lost the Millenials’ parents, the Baby Boomers, to European and Japanese carmakers and that’s where they’ve stayed for the most part.