Trends, Enablers, and Barriers for Car Ownership

Abstract

Car ownership has been the object of interest in various research areas. Studies on the topic focus especially on the influence of factors such as environment, life, family events, use, and availability, usually restricted to a given city or region. This paper focuses on recent studies that identified enablers, barriers, and trends related to car ownership in the automotive sector. We use an exploratory-qualitative approach based on systematic mapping of the literature to select papers published between 2019 and March 2021 on the Scopus database. As a result, we first classified the factors that act as enablers or barriers to the acquisition and maintenance of cars. These factors were divided into the following six groups: personal, cultural, political, economic, technological, and environmental. Next, we identified car-ownership-related trends for the automotive sector: purchase replaced by effective use; restrictions on car ownership; autonomous driving; sustainable mobility; new mobility models; customized customer service; real-time integrated modal communication, systematic global traffic, and integrated urban planning. We consider our findings to be relevant contributions to the industry in relation to establishing strategies and public administrators acting in the transportation planning field.