Do you have two cars in your family? And if so, why?

[Homeiswherethedogsare]

Would love my own car one day once I get over fear of driving (another topic) but realise it woukd be a waste of money as I work in central London and don’t need it much apart from the odd days in the weekend.
DH uses the car every day to go to work.
Curious to know, do most families have multiple cars and if so why?
We don’t have a big budget for cars so maybe it would be better to have one nicer one than 2 old and average?

We do - it would be very difficult to manage with just one, although I suppose we could (I’d have to drop dh into work and pick him up, and then on days he needed to travel during the working day I would have to use Uber/shit buses/walk a bit too far than is convenient). We did manage with one car for a time when dh was working in the city centre (got train in - I dropped him off and picked him up from station) and we had pre-school age dc - it would be a lot more difficult now. Anyway, both of our cars are company cars and cost us very little to run as they are electric.

Edited to add that if we lived in London I doubt either of us would bother with a car - probably just use taxis when necessary.

We tried for a while with just one but once two years of roadworks hit the main motorway running through our town it became impossible to get us all dropped off at two places of work, school and nursery on time in one car.

4 cars in my household. Me & DH have 1 each & 2 adult DC have their own too (17th birthday present from us).

We all have 1 each so we can go wherever we want when ever we want without having to ask permission, check who needs it 'more' etc.

We live in a town with nearly 90000 people but with next to no public transport. No train line let alone station here, bus goes three times a day to the town centre & thats it.

I will never give up my own personal car ri share with DH. I would give up pretty much everything else before I even considered it

2 cars, will probably get DS1 a small runaround a soon as he's passed his test. We live rurally with dreadful public transport, but even if we didn't, I would still have my own car, whether DH wanted to have one of his own or not. I love my car, it gives me such freedom and independence, I would cut back on a lot of other things before I gave up my car.
(Had my own car back when I lived in London too - public transport was fine in town, but if you wanted to go anywhere else it was not great)

We have always had 2
One each, sometimes needed 2. One of us is remote worker and the other commutes by train. We have 1 good car and my little old one. Youngest dd is doing lessons so will prob use the old one when she passes

@Swifey40similar here. I have a 4x4 as DD has horses and we have a horse trailer to compete. DP has a super old BMW 5 series for 'fun' and then we have 2 1980s Escorts (a car and a van) that we're doing up. Oh and an old Rover estate as a banger for hefting stuff around! Love cars!

We have 5. Me, DH and 3 kids all have a car. We need them because we all need to be in different places daily.

We have a ‘work horse’ for all the motorway miles we do (30k plus) and a fun sporty (and cheap!) car convertible for sunny weekends and country lanes.

Work, kids & parental logistics

We have 2 cars- one 10 years old and the other 8 years old .
We live in the middle of nowhere and I have a 35 min commute in one direction which has zero bus service. DH commutes 30mins in the opposite direction with a sparse service that doesn’t align with his work hours and he would have a 40minute walk at the other end 🤷‍♀️

No, but majority of our neighbours have 2, even if wife doesn't work. I will never understand it. What a waste of money.

So we get to work, and if DH is at work, I can still go out for the day with DS.

I’ve suggested to the other half we think about dropping a few vehicles. I have a city car, great economy, nippy, parks in any tight spot. My husband, and myself are petrol heads so he has a classic car that’s 54 years old and his modern, still 22 years old, but it’s a motor way, long distance, carries everything, collects relatives to visit. We have a motor home, which is a bit of a luxury and I seriously think it should go, it’s almost 35 years old and certainly paid us well in travel.
I have a motorcycle and my husband has three, and a couple of vintage mopeds.

A bit excessive in my opinion, but all very useful for our lifestyle.

My flatmate of old moved to London and only got a car when she moved back to Wiltshire, she had no need for one, until the bus in the village didn’t work for her anymore to get to work.

We had one between us until we moved somewhere two miles from the nearest public transport. Now we need two se we can do school run/shopping/get to the train station. We sometimes cycle but that doesn’t always work.

Freedom. We could with a lot of juggling survive with one but it would be a PITA.

My parents had one car for most of their marriage and it was one of the bugbears of my mother's life and the cause of many an argument, until she got her own car.

When DH and I first moved in together we agreed to share one car and see how we got on. Twenty years and three children later, we still only have one. But we live in London and don't need to drive daily.

We have been fortunate that only one of our DC has needed driving around to sports fixtures. It's difficult on one car if one needs to be at football and another has a hockey match at the same time in the opposite direction. Also, none of our parents needed a long period of care before they died - that puts strain on vehicle usage too.

When we first had 2, it was because we worked in different locations. Now we work in the same town and normally drive in together, but we sometimes need to go separately if one of us has a late meeting etc. Plus ds has now passed his tesr too.

DH uses one of them and works away, so that car is at the airport 3 days/2 nights most weeks. I could manage without one during the week, but the DCs do different hobbies at the weekends, so we are always using both on Saturdays.

We have 3 dc and different work locations on some days. One car is also now shared with dd1.

DH and I both need one for work, and our young adult DC share a third one. We live rurally - when we lived in London we didn't have a car.

we had one car for a while (we needed one for dh business), but i’m disabled so any time he had it it was hard for me to get around and i got fed up being at the mercy of his work schedule, so we got an additional small car for me, and now my kid is driving he and i share it.

Yes because we both need them for work in different places, neither of which we can use public transport for. Also we would be more restricted on the weekends with only one car, we live rurally so can’t get many places on public transport

No because its less than a handful of times a year that we need to be driving in two different places at once. Neither of us needs a car for work, so that's probably the main reason we dont have more than 1 car.

We've gone through phases over our 20 year relationship of one car vs two depending on commutes etc. For large parts of that time DH could commute by public transport so we only needed one. Now we have two because DH needed one to get to work and I need one for school and club runs. Unfortunately DD's primary school is not walkable.

It's borderline as to whether we need two now as DH changed jobs a few months ago and could manage on public transport if he had to but his car is old and not worth much, cheap to insure and more or less free to run over the summer from our solar panels as it's electric so we've agreed to reassess before the insurance renews in September.

We've always had two cars because in the early years of our relationship we both drove to work every day. After a few years I started commuting to London on the train and we could realistically have gone down to one car but you kind of get used to having your own.

If I wanted to go to the gym or pop to tesco before he got home from work I could just jump in my own car. My car got stolen just before my first mat leave and I decided not to replace it until I was working again. I HATED not having my own car. H took his to work and I was stuck unless something was walking distance. Baby groups, medical appointments, grocery shopping, all took so bloody long without a car.

Later when we had 2 kids it was really handy when they did different clubs/hobbies at the weekends. We would be zooming off in different directions with a kid each!

We have one "main" car and an old little runaround which is great for nipping around locally. Eldest learnt to drive in it which was handy and much cheaper to insure than the bigger newer car. I'm not lazy, i walk and cycle a lot but I love the freedom a car gives me. For example in Weds I'm WFH and I have a hospital appointment 15 miles away. As I can jump in the car I can call it my lunch break. If I was going via train/taxi I would have had to book half a day off work. H is working on site so I wouldn't have had his car available.