The value of car ownership and use in the United States

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 (..