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?

Nope. I walk to work and DH cycles, so we have one car, and use it when we need to. I last drove on Saturday morning, and will do so again on Weds.

We have 2 but my job is now almost entirely from home so we have considered going down to one. Public transport is awful though (1 bus an hour and takes an hour to get to the nearest train station). So we keep 2 so DH can go to golf and I can go to yoga at the same time on a Saturday.

People need vehicles for all kinds of reasons. We are a family of 4 with 5 vehicles, though one is a tractor 🚜. We also have a work pickup, DH and I have a car each, as does recently passed teenager as there are no buses to get her to work. DS cycles to school, but is saving for his own car when the time comes.

We have 3. Family of 5. DH takes his to work does around 150 miles daily. I use mine for school runs and to the station. dd has one but she carpools with me and has hers for freedom in evenings and weekends.

We have two because we work in locations that are 10 odd miles apart. There is only one bus an hour locally which if we used would mean either getting to work excessively early or being late, albeit the bus wouldn't be able to get DH to work anyway because it's so far away from anything so it'd be me hanging around. To be honest the bus is so expensive that cost wise it probably wouldn't make much difference anyway (if you ignore the initial outlay/purchase - bought the car second hand outright 10 years ago).

We both commute an hourish from home in different directions. We live rurally and buses are nonexistent.

A family near us have 7 or 8 cars , all their kids drive and they have 1 each. They squeeze them all onto a drive, and every time we pass we imagine what a ballache it would be if yours was first in and you wanted to go out!

We have two. DH leaves for work mega early in the morning before there is any public transport available, and we can’t walk to DD’s nursery as there’s no pavement for half a mile and people drive like twats on rural roads

They aren’t swanky new cars though…one is 25 years old and the other 13 😂 I always expect them to go at the same time and then we’ll be left with zero cars!

We have 2 because we live in the countryside and need access to 2 vehicles for work and school pick up drop off!

We both need to drive to work. DH works shift work and can't rely on public transport at night and I work in a rural location that's 30 mins drive from home but nearly 2 hours on public transport, plus one of us will need to do a drop off/pick up as well.

We have 6 vehicles in our home.
DH for work I have 2 one is a 4x4 as a vet in the country and high up require it for driving up farm tracks in the winter.
I also have a run about for my days off as don’t drive my work vehicle then.
Three children drive a car each and when their partners come over 3 more vehicles.
We have a large parking area which can take all the vehicles comfortable so no angry neighbours regarding on street parking.

Wince at our car fuel account bill now!

Is one the Batmobile?

We have two cars. DH works in London but I don’t. My car provides more than a means to get to work. It’s freedom and although we’d save a fortune having one car, I refuse to share one.

Two here and three when DD is home from uni. We both work in different places, DH in a place which doesn't have easy public transport links from where we live (it would probably take about three hours with multiple train changes). I could probably cope without mine but it just makes life easier as my hours are long and sometimes unpredictable. Also, DH has a hobby which takes him away for weekends fairly frequently so I would be stranded at the weekends. Having said that, when we lived in a city, we had no car, and we're very familiar with local bus routes but it was easy and fast and frequent.

Because we don't go everywhere joined at the hip! Often doing different things at the same time, so both need separate transport.

2 cars and a work van. And because we want them!

Like virtually everyone else on this thread, we have three cars because three of us all need to travel to different workplaces that aren't accessible by public transport.

Im guessing that the OP is too embarrassed at not working out this fairly simple fact for herself to come back to the thread 🙂

No, 1 car and 3 bicycles. It's the least we can make work.

We have one, we live near very good public transport.

We've got 4 otr cars between 2 of us. One each for daily drives, I have a 'summer' car as well, and dh has a workhorse jalopy for tip runs, hobby things etc. There's various other vehicles knocking about too, in various states of disrepair (I married a petrol head). We live in the middle of nowhere, we both work and have a school age child.

😆

I would argue with the running costs of a car vs. rail travel after the initial purchase is paid for. It costs me £12 return (even now) to drive to my office about an hour and a half away. On the train it would take over 3 hours each way including the drive to the station and the walk at the other end, and my ticket would cost me £75. Modern cars are not expensive to keep up as bodywork doesn’t rust, and if you buy a reliable make then a car driven regularly and serviced at the right intervals can last at the very least a decade and often much more before problems become costly. My last car was still worth over £1000 when I sold it at 17 years old and with over 200,000 miles on the clock, and had never cost me anything in repairs beyond wear and tear items. Actually not completely true - I had to replace the front shocks after a pothole incident, and the bushes went at some point. But no expensive engine work.

Um because we need to be in the different places at the same time and said places are 30 miles apart? I could get public transport but to get to work on time I’d need to get on the train at 5.30 which would be fine if it actually ran at that time. Which it does not.

Husband works 90 minutes away (not accessible on public transport), and I work across 4 different sites (also no public transport). Kids in school 20 mins drive away. If we only had one car the kids would have to move schools and one of us would have to give up our job! I’d love to be able to walk to more places, but that’s life when you live rurally.

Like most rural folk, we have a car each, plus an old Land Rover DH is restoring. And DC's old car that we were intending to sell but it's so much cheaper to run (60mpg v 30mpg) that DH is using it as a runabout.