Overall, car ownership in America is on the rise, and it sounds like these memes should be pretty much universal. Only 8.3% of households in the US did not have a vehicle in 2022.

That year, most households (91.7%) had at least one, 37% of them had two, and another 22.1% of households had three or more.

Over the past five years, new cars have cost $41,531 on average, and used ones were $26,042. That's a 30% price increase for the former and a 40.3% increase for the latter.

However, the contents of such memes and our life on the road can soon become quite different, as the so-called connected cars, vehicles equipped with internet access, are increasingly becoming the norm. By 2030, more than 95% of the passenger cars sold are projected to have embedded connectivity, according to Counterpoint Technology Market Research.

This allows car manufacturers to offer functions related to safety and security, predictive maintenance, and prognostics, but it also opens the door for companies to collect, share, or sell data related to driving habits and other personal information that people may not want to be shared.

Most car manufacturers provide options to opt out of unnecessary data sharing, but as with many other consumer technologies where there is money to be made from the sale of data, these settings are oftentimes buried within menus, according to Counterpoint senior analyst Parv Sharma.

Many consumers simply aren't aware of the fact that their data is being used, or that it’s being used at all.

A Salesforce survey of more than 2,000 car owners and lessors in America discovered that few understand the definition of a connected car and what data is being collected. And while drivers may be willing to trade personal data for some benefits — like advanced personalization and cheaper insurance — not knowing how data is being used could leave consumers vulnerable, industry professionals said. 

People who, at some point in their lives, have struggled to afford a car, or lived without one, know how complicated life can get without access to a vehicle. Car ownership has always been expensive, but recent trends suggest that it is getting worse.

Arizona State University Professor David King and two colleagues, Michael Manville at UCLA and Michael Smart at Rutgers, decided to look at the falling socioeconomic status of carless people in the US.

In a paper published in 2019, they showed that the poverty rate among carless families rose between 1960 and 2014 but at the same time, the number of poor people with a car increased by 20 percent. The way a car unlocks access to almost everything ensures that most people will, despite the costs, do whatever they can to acquire one.

What surprised King was how pronounced the income gap between car owners and the carless was in many places of the country. The disparity between an auto-owning household and a carless household was about as large as it is between a homeowner and a renter. “We were really surprised that the relationship is as stark as it is,” King said.

King also feels that we should increase car availability for low-income people. Yes, they are harmful to the environment, expensive, and loaded with negative externalities. But the individual benefits to low-income people are too great to ignore. “Just because too much driving is bad,” he said, “doesn’t mean we should punish people who’d be better off by driving more.”

Ultimately, cars have become synonymous with freedom, and maybe that's why we're chasing them so much, no matter the cost—they reflect our universal quest for mobility and independence.