To think 2 car households are totally normal these days.

[Karleeb30]

I appreciate not everyone can afford to run 2 cars but it is a necessity in our case.

We live rurally with no public transport links. Dp works unsociable hours, I'm currently off work but have needed it for work previously , just not currently.. We have two dc who both have sen so needed for appointments when dp is at work. I'd also be very isolated without a car living where we do. We have thought about just having one buy it would be a struggle with appointments and no public transport links.

Basically we have dp's 15 year old trusty car he's had forever that he uses for work. He's had it for years. It's not suitable for us as a family as only a 3 door and small and wouldn't be great for dc.

Then we have a 6 year old (that we bought second hand last year ) family car which I use more than him but dp drives too at the weekends. Previously we had an older car as a second car.

It is a struggle to keep both going at times but both are pretty reliable so far (hopefully don't jinx it here) and haven't cost us much other than your average costs for a car.

I have recently received remarks off a family member. Saying we must be rich if we have 2 cars especially if I am not working (which is degrading tbh, people have no right to judge us in our current circumstances and they don't work themselves which is the funniest thing about it so they are very hypocritical.

We are not rich, we get by but living month by month especially down to one wage currently, we do struggle. We don't have any other luxuries!

We are fortunate we can keep 2 cars running because I know not everyone can but like I said we don't have much else in the terms of luxuries.

Aibu to think 2 cars is not a luxury in most cases but a necessity and people should
Keep their beaks out where it's not needed?

We are in that middle between rich and poor where we aren't rich (I wish) and we aren't poor either.

We just have one car but we both work from home and our children's school is in walking distance. Very occasionally it's an issue if I have to work from a different site as DH will need the car for kids after school activities but we can by and large predict that and work around it by organising lift shares etc and as I say it's rare. It's not worth us paying out for a 2nd car ok the very odd occasion we need one.

We’re a three car household, dunno what that makes us!

If you’re fairly rural it’s absolutely normal, not having a car is incredibly restrictive.

You can Google the stats-

In 2020, the majority of British households (36.15 million) owned one car. Meanwhile, an estimated 17 million households in Great Britain owned no cars. This was a marginal increase from 2019. An estimated 25.7 million households owned two cars.

I've also read that approximately a third of households cannot afford to run a car. Not sure on the veracity of this, but I've no reason to doubt it. Food for thought anyway.

It is a luxury of sorts, but I agree with you about location.

We are rural. The only reason we cope with one car is that both dh and I work from home. Dh full time, so I have the car weekdays when needed for child, and day to day stuff. We would have to get a second car if dh worked in an office.

Our local public transport is dire. Firstly it’s 1.5km down a steep hill ( so up steep hill on return). It’s every 2hrs roughly, nothing between Saturday 1pm and Monday 7am. Nothing after 8pm any day.

I took Ds to hospital Thursday night around 6pm (45min drive). Google tells me it would have taken me 2.5hrs by public transport, and to get back at 10pm it just says unavailable until morning.

Yes, I think it's normal.
We have 2 cars. I'm a SAHM. My DH loves cars we both have top of the range models.
Growing up I didn't know anyone whose family has 2 cars. My dad had an old banger, with 6 kids in the back seat. 😆

Lots of people are 2 (or more !) car families these days. We struggled selling our last home because parking was a huge issue due to lots of multiple car households on a small street.

We only have one car though: I can’t drive, and we live somewhere with really good public transport: and we are both walking distance from work if need be

Why are you giving this any head space? You know if you need two cars, and if you do, then you do. It is no one elses business.

In your circumstances it’s totally reasonable. We lasted years when I was growing up with only one car, my dad used to cycle to work and my mum drove. We then inherited a second car when a grandparent died which was pretty handy when me and my sibling learnt to drive. We too loved rurally with limited public transport.

I know quite a few families on London with two cars and neither adult even drives to work. What an absolute waste of resources. It’s usually because the woman refuses to drive the kind of car the man wants. So there’s a “fun” car that the man drives and a much less exciting car as the family car.

we actually have 3 cars.
1is my daughter (Passed test last year)
Family car that Is mine and I use with our 3 younger DC

Dp has A 2seater van.
All cars are also used for our own work places.
We live semi rural.
If anyone said anything to us, regardless of size of cars for family, I'd simply laugh and to tell them to go worry about something else

2 cars and 2 motorbikes between the 2 of us here.

My conscience is clean as we can only every drive 1 at a time each and it's rare that we're both driving at the same time....

@DecadentlyDecisive

2 cars and 2 motorbikes between the 2 of us here.

My conscience is clean as we can only every drive 1 at a time each and it's rare that we're both driving at the same time....

If you don't both drive at the same time why do you need the second car? I don't quite get what you're saying

Just depends on your finances and your needs doesn't it. Some love in cities and use public transport for everything, some don't. We have 2 because we both worked in different places, neither feasible on public transport once you added in children needing to be taken to wraparound care. Since covid we could manage on 1 because only 1 of us works outside the home. Except at some point dh will be back at the office.

I've always lived in small towns or villages with poor public transport links. Nearly everyone I know is a 2-car household, possibly more cars in the home if they have teens that drive.
Even going back to my childhood (80s / 90s) nearly all of my friends' parents ran two cars in their households.
It's very normal.

Unless I was a farmer or something I wouldn’t choose a lifestyle that needed every adult to have a car.

It seems wasteful and environmentally disastrous.

If no one is disabled / has to be deeply rural for work, we need to think about where we can get public transport, walk for things like school, or cycle.

Why does it bother you if they call you rich? What is it with the race to prove that everyone is on breadline?

I’d rather not have two cars but we work in entirely opposite directions in jobs that can’t be done at home and we live in part of the county that doesn’t have much in the way of public transport, especially before 9am. One is our old little C1 which was the first car we ever bought. We invested in a 3 year old Golf last year because we were planning on having a baby. In an ideal world we’d work nearer each other and share one car but for now we have the family car and the runaround.

Ooh, also:

I used to live next door to a couple who each had a Ford Focus. They had almost matching reg plates because they bought them on the same day. That baffled me - surely if you need two cars, you get them to suit different needs, rather than two different colours? 🤷🏻‍♀️

I don’t get that we have one big and one small car. DH regularly uses mine for short journeys, to his mate where parking is difficult.

DH works somewhere with zero public transport and my school hours job wouldn’t work as it would take me over an hour on the bus.

I do have a friend who recently got rid of her second car. She’s moved to wfh and her husband works abroad/wfh so they had stopped using them.

We have 2 cars. Mine is the family car and I use it daily on the school run (we're fairly rural - DD's school is 10 miles away)

DH has an old banger, which refuses to conk out and because of his shifts needs his car. He has ocassionally cycled to work, but again, because of shift patterns it's sometimes not feasible and there's no guarantee he'll finish work when he should. (emergency services)

It's not ideal but we do need them both.

12% of households have two cars.

@Larryyourwaiter an hour on a bus to work is unremarkable if you are too poor to run a car.

we have 2 pretty old cars (both over 12 years old)
If I'm honest we dont really need 2 cars. We barely drive either of them during the week but tend to do different things at the same time at the weekend.
Almost all the houses on our road has (at least) 2 cars although not that that has any influence over our decision.

@julieca like I said it’s school hours. I wouldn’t make it on time by the time I could leave.

We only have one car but we are the exception in our overflowing street. The driveways are only big enough for one car but most people have at least 2 so parking is a bit tricky. Growing up in a more rural area, every adult that could drive needed a car really. At one point my mum and day had 4 when my dbro and I learned to drive!

We do have public transport so as long as you work ‘regular hours’ you can get away without a car. I work shifts so would not cope without a car. DH used to get the train, now he is working from home.

I think we would struggle to afford 2 cars but the car we have is very new and not cheap so it’s all about priorities.

There was a guy that posted on the Glasgow subreddit yesterday about his and his wife's cars had been stolen, someone replied that they must be rich to have two cars utter bitterness

We've no cars, several couple friends share a car or have one each. Makes no odds to me.