The average car is driven 65 minutes per day. That's it.
For the other 23 hours, it sits in a driveway, a parking lot, or on the side of a road. Doing absolutely nothing.
95% of its entire existence is spent parked.
This isn't one study. It's been verified across 84 cities worldwide using three completely different methods of calculation. The US Department of Energy confirmed it again in 2022. The RAC Foundation found the same in the UK. Donald Shoup documented it in his 800-page book The High Cost of Free Parking. The number holds everywhere: 92% to 96%, depending on the city.
Think about what that means:
A car is the second-most expensive thing most people will ever buy, after their home. The average new car costs over $48,000 (about R870,000). And it spends 95% of its life as a very expensive piece of furniture that happens to be outside.
It gets worse:
- The average car carries just 1.6 people per trip — 3 or 4 empty seats, every journey
- 28% of all car trips are 1.6 km (1 mile) or less — walking distance
- Cars take up enormous amounts of space even when parked — the average parking space is roughly 14 m² (150 sq ft), and most cities dedicate more land to parking than to housing
- In Los Angeles, there are an estimated 18.6 million parking spaces for 3.9 million people
The economic waste is staggering. If you buy a car for $48,000 and use it 5% of the time, you're paying roughly $9,100 per percentage point of use per year (factoring in insurance, fuel, depreciation, and maintenance). The total cost of car ownership in the US averages $12,000 per year — for something that sits idle 95% of the time.
This is why urban planners are obsessed with car-sharing, ride-hailing, and public transport. A shared vehicle gets used 40-60% of the day instead of 5%. If every car were shared, cities could dramatically reduce the number of vehicles — and reclaim the parking space for housing, parks, or anything more useful than storing metal boxes.
The next time you look at your car in the driveway, you're looking at a $48,000 asset that works a 72-minute shift and takes the rest of the day off.