Cars take people to work, to school, to parties, to supermarkets, to doctors, and to many other places. A car can be used for weekend excursions, long trips, or just local driving. How much a car is used for these activities—in fact, whether the household has a car at all—is strongly influenced by family income. Money or good credit is necessary to buy a car in the first place. Money is also necessary for repairs, insurance, licenses, and gasoline.

The poor use less energy in travel than does the rest of the population. The poor have fewer cars and use less gasoline in the cars they have. They take fewer long trips. When they do take long trips, the poor are less likely to use an airplane (the highest energy user). Lower middle income households also use comparatively little energy in travel.

Cars

Comparatively few of the poor and lower middle households have cars. The position of these less advantaged households with respect to car ownership improved during the 1960s, but was still dramatically lower than the more advantaged groups. Over the 1960s, an important change among the more advantaged groups was the increase in the number of households having two or more cars. For the lower middle and poor, there was a modest increase in the number of households having two or more cars, but the more striking point is that so many households remained without any car at all. Almost half the poor and one-sixth of the lower middle still had no car in 1973 (Table 5-14).

The poor have older cars than others and they buy more used cars. Seven-tenths of the cars owned by the poor were five years old or older, while less than four-tenths of the cars owned by the well off were that old (Table 5-15). About three-fifths of all cars are standard models. About one-fifth are compacts and subcompacts. The rest are vans, pickup trucks, and luxury cars. The van or pickup is somewhat more common among the poor, and the compact is somewhat more common among the well off (Table 5-15).

At first glance, it may seem extraordinary that the well off own proportionately more compacts than the poor. This seeming anomaly occurs because few of the poor own two cars or more compared with over three-fourths of the well off. The second or third car of a well off household is often a compact. Looking at the ratio of cars per hundred households, this becomes clearer. Poor households average fourteen compacts per hundred households while the well off average over 50. The poor average 42 standard cars per hundred households, while the well off have 115—an average of more than one per household (Table 5-16).

The more advantaged households have more cars and use much more gasoline than do less advantaged households. Well off and upper middle income