Why it doesn’t matter that YOU don’t want self-driving cars.

TL;DR — Your kids do.

Self-driving cars are coming, and you may not want it, but it doesn’t matter. “Not in my back yard!” screams an entire generation who identifies so closely with their cars. A reporter learning about Google’s latest advances in self-driving cars yells at Sergey Brin — “How dare you mess with that relationship between the car lover and their car?” It’s beside the point because the so-called “car lover” is already waning in popularity.

The current generation of driving mentality is already going the way of the dodo. People are driving much less than they used to, car ownership is down, and teen drivers are waiting longer and longer to get their licenses. FHA data shows the number of 16- and 17-year-olds with licenses has declined since 2007. At the same time, ride-sharing and on-demand transportation companies such as Uber and Lyft are hugely popular and successful.

The truth is, millennials don’t want all the hassle that comes from buying, insuring, maintaining, fueling, parking, and driving their cars. Teenagers make their parents do all that instead. Millennials move to areas with good public transit and accessible downtowns instead. Living way out in suburbia with a gas-guzzler isn’t nearly as popular anymore.

Car companies have done their best to make driving more enjoyable. They’ve made it much less stressful to parallel park your car. They’ve added warning indicators and even added technology to prevent lane drifting on the highway. Blind spot detection, backup cameras, the list goes on… They’ve done their best to make you less anxious to drive.

Tesla’s latest Model X boasts a ton of cool new features too. Automatic door opening when you walk up, easily accessible seats and storage, even falcon wing doors for crying out loud. Soon they can even plug themselves in!

These things might seem frivolous to folks unable to drop the equivalent of a small home mortgage on a car, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These are exactly the kind of features you need to make a platform of self-driving cars a reality. Elon Musk is pretty much a genius at finding ways to finance his greater ambitions through smart ventures into seemingly unrelated products. Selling luxury cars gives him the opportunity to build the tech for the rest of us.

Easing into the self-driving car revolution through creature comforts and increased accessibility seems to be the new mantra for appealing to the current generation of car buyers. You don’t have to want self-driving cars, but you know you already want the parking and highway assist (and some falcon-wing doors). You don’t have to want self-driving cars, you just get to finance them.

For your kids, all of these features will be taken for granted. They don’t want to drive, they just want to get where they’re going.

For the next generation, summoning up a self-driving car to the theater will seem just as mundane as your cross-town Uber trips now.