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The value of car ownership and use in the United States

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 769–774 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

It is widely accepted that consumers underestimate the full cost of car ownership and that correcting this bias could meaningfully accelerate the adoption of shared mobility. Yet this argument fails to consider how much benefit consumers enjoy from owning their own vehicle. Here we estimate the value of private car ownership and use in four US metro areas—Chicago, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Seattle, Washington; and Washington DC—using online discrete choice experiments. We find that, on average, people would need to be paid $11,197 to give up access to their privately owned vehicle for one year, which is at least as much as estimates of the average total private cost of vehicle ownership (~$9,000). Critically, we find that more than half of this value is non-use value—such as the option to travel whenever or wherever needed at a moment’s notice and the status that comes from owning one’s own vehicle—beyond the use value of getting from A to B. Further, this non-use value was found to be much higher during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings reframe the conversation around the transition away from private vehicle dependence, emphasizing the need to provide value and convenience if alternative mobility solutions are to be widely adopted.

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Fig. 1: Disutility of losing an option for a year based on BWS maxdiff model estimation; all results are relative to earning $100 less per year set to disutility = 0.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available because they contain information that could compromise research participant privacy/consent.

Code availability

The full questionnaire, analysis code and results are available at https://github.com/jcmoody6/car-value. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by an MIT Energy Initiative’s Mobility Systems Center project grant awarded to D.R.K. and J.M.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mobility Systems Center, MIT Energy Initiative, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Joanna Moody

  2. Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Elizabeth Farr

  3. Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

    Marisa Papagelis

  4. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    David R. Keith

Authors
  1. Joanna Moody
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  2. Elizabeth Farr
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  4. David R. Keith
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Contributions

J.M. and D.R.K. developed the original research question; J.M., E.F. and D.R.K. designed the questionnaire and stated preference experiments; J.M., E.F. and M.P. oversaw data collection and undertook data analysis; J.M., E.F. and D.R.K. wrote and revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to David R. Keith.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks Sonja Haustein, Rico Krueger and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary discussion, Figs. 1–10 and Tables 1–7.

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Moody, J., Farr, E., Papagelis, M. et al. The value of car ownership and use in the United States. Nat Sustain 4, 769–774 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00731-5

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