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I grew up in a country with dense urban centers, where most people rely on public transit to get around even if they do have a car, because of traffic. On top of that, when I was growing up, car was very much a luxury there - most families had none, and the lucky ones had one.

I live in US now, in an area that is the edge of suburban sprawl, and I can tell you this: owning a car is very liberating on an emotional level. You can go wherever you want, when you want it, without making plans around it or having to share your space with strangers. For the first couple of years, I would go driving entirely on a whim. On a few occasions, my weekends became spontaneous multi-day road trips. It was very enjoyable, and I still rather enjoy driving in general.

I wouldn't switch back.

Yes, I know, cars come with a lot of externalities. That's not my point, though. I just wanted to show that not everyone is in a "love/hate relationship" with cars. Some of us actually do find it all genuinely enjoyable to the point where any associated inconveniences are minor, while the benefits are major. So when your solution involves taking those benefits away, don't be surprised if you get pushback.

Most of all, if you go around telling people that they don't really derive any benefit from their cars, and if only they could surrender their preconceived notions and listen to the voice of reason, it would be better for them in all or most respects - don't be surprised if your argument is dismissed out of hand.

It may well be that we need to give up cars for some important reason. But you'll have to convince me that the reason is important enough on its own merits - not because I don't have anything to lose. I know better.

> What prevents you from renting a car when you want to drive out to the countryside?

Nothing, but it is a barrier. When you own a car, you just get in, make sure you've got gas, and go. When you don't, you need to go out and find a rental place, get there, find a car you want/like, etc.

It's a small barrier, and mostly psychological, but it's there and it affects decisions.

Yup. I cycle a lot, and when I first moved to USA I tried to live the car rental only lifestyle in the Bay Area. In someways this was easier than I expected:

* Most US car rental price comparison sites let you book a car months in advance to lock in the price, but you don't pay till pick up. There's almost never a penalty for booking and not picking up, so I used to just block book the weekends months in advance, whether I needed the car or not.

* I just used the big rental firms - at the time services like ZipCar were priced to heavily incentivise you to only drive between ZipCar areas and drop off, e.g. use a different car for the outbound journey and the return one. Using them for all-day tripping often ended up being significantly more expensive than a traditional rental. I've no idea if this has improved. Car sharing services appeared to really rely on both your start and end destinations being in their 'coverage' areas though.

* Once I got to know staff at my local rental place, I started getting 'free' upgrades a lot.

However, after four or five months I ended up buying a modest low mileage 3 year old Honda. The cost of running isn't actually all that much more, and now I don't have to factor in travel time to rental place, having to refill the rental before return, clock-watching etc. This is entirely selfish of me of course, but very much caused by the small 'barrier' you mention.

I've generally optimized for convenience: it's easy for me to ignore the expense when I consider my overall transportation + rent budget (the two aren't really fully extricable).

It's a pretty serious psychological barrier. When you already own a car, the maintenance and finance costs are already sunk costs, so the marginal cost of doing a weekend trip is quite low -- pretty much just the cost of gas. When you don't own a car, now you have to throw in the cost of the rental too, which can easily make a $20 trip turn into a $120 trip or more (it costs $100 per day to rent a car near me, so an weekend camping trip jumps up to $220). Even if the total cost with the occasional rental is less, the marginal costs are structured in a completely different way, which ends up negatively incentivizing it.

Hell, I live in Manhattan and I now don't do a lot of things I used to do when I lived out in the suburbs and had a car, for precisely this reason. Instead I do a lot more things on my bicycle, including long weekend trips -- it's basically become to me what my car used to be to me when I lived in the suburbs. Except using it actually improves my health.

There are a bunch of other small inconveniences too.

I own a car but I've considered renting cars for trips multiple times (you don't have to care as much about a rental car, you don't mind if other people are driving it, it's normal to split rental car expenses but weird to split, say, the depreciation on your car) etc. But it's often a hassle.

Most rental car centers in the city do not open before say 9 am (the best I have seen is 8 am) and close by 5-6 pm. After you do all the paper work and blah blah it's typically 9-10 am before you can leave for your trip. This is just not practical for a lot of weekend trips. The other option is to rent it on Friday (which means you pay for a day more), but since they close by 5 pm you need to rent it on Friday morning at 9 am which means you have to now plan it along with your work day.

The other option is to rent from the airport where the centers are generally open 24/7 but charge more and the airport is far so now you have to take that into account.

The other problem is when you rent for a long trip and have to pay per day when you know you'll actually be driving only on a few of those days.

Right, this is the mental speedbump I referred to. I just get tired of people pretending that you're precluded from easily driving out away from cities, instead of the much-lesser inconvenience of "having to get used to the minuscule additional mental barrier". In my own personal experience it took me about three trips before this latter issue vanished.

The difference between the magnitude of the two ways of stating this "downside" are vast, and I hear people conflate them constantly.

In Canada, renting a car when you're under 25 years old is pretty annoying. It's usually an extra $25 a day and that's what turned me off to renting. Some rental companies won't even let you get a car if you're under 25. It's actually a function of age, so I'm currently 24 and in theory, it should be cheaper now.. so let's do some blanket math to entertain your idea.

- I drive my car only on weekends, so Friday - Sunday

- It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time(BMWs have expensive repairs.) That's $4000 a year

- Insurance is about $1750 for a year

- Looking at rates at www.enterprise.com for my city, it's about $100 CAD for a rental car for 3 days (pick up at 7:00AM Friday and drop off at 4:00PM on Sunday.)

- $100 CAD * 4 is about $400 a month for a rental

- $4000 (repairs) + $1750 (insurance) + $120 (stickers) is about $489 for owning

It looks like using rental cars on weekends is not a great investment still and that makes me sad. I only save $89 a month and have to deal with picking up and dropping off the car and also not using it through the week. $1068 in yearly savings is not worth it!

Note: Gas is not included because I have to pay for gas for both cars, I guess it might be a little cheaper for the rental cars since they tend to be gas efficient, but I still don't think it's huge savings.

What about something like Zipcar?

$4000 in repairs a year? What kind of clunker are you driving?

A BMW apparently. Isn't it well known that these are the most expensive cars to maintain?

An easy way to improve your situation is to sell the BMW and get a more practical and reliable vehicle. Granted, that works more in favor against the rental car.

I also don't think it's a given that you'd need a rental car every single weekend. If you need a car every single weekend then owning one yourself clearly makes the most sense. It's when you only need the car occasionally that it would make more sense.

> It tends to break down every 3 months, at around $1000 a repair each time

That's really not good. Even BMW's are not that expensive to maintain, something is really wrong with your vehicle. Unless it's a classic and you're using it as a daily driver.

Former E46 3 series owner here, roughly 10 years into the life of the car. It was expensive.

The only actual negative I can think of is the mental friction of having to pay each time

Don't underestimate this. People will pay a large premium for unlimited internet, for example, just to relieve themselves of the mental burden of maybe, possibly, once a year going over and getting hit with $5 or $10 in overage fees. Companies know this. They exploit the hell out of it!