No one had ever been so enthusiastic about a used Toyota Yaris.
That was my thought one morning in August 2025 when my wife and I picked up the keys to the car we found on Facebook Marketplace. For the first time in seven years of living in the Washington, DC area, we were car owners.
It was also something of a rebuke to one of the companies I write about most often. For years, Uber executives have said the company’s drivers — and increasingly the self-driving cars in its app — compete with car ownership.
Uber President Andrew MacDonald said in a podcast last month that the rising cost of a new car makes owning one a worse deal than it was just a few years ago. And CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said last year that the rise of robotaxis will reduce car ownership over the next twenty years, making driving yourself “kind of like riding a horse.”
So, did I make a terrible mistake by spending just over $6,000 on a used, subcompact car that is essentially the next draft horse?
Last month, a year after purchasing my Yaris, I decided to add up all my expenses and compare them to the year before, when I was car-free and dependent on Uber, Lyft, and public transportation.
Your mileage varies. Your own calculation will depend on where you live, the cost of your car, how quickly it depreciates, and the current price of gasoline (or charging, if you drive an electric car).
My results showed that Uber might have a point.
The costs of a Toyota Yaris are increasing
My wife and I decided we wanted a car last summer when we realized parking at our apartment complex was free.
For us in Washington, owning a car never made sense. D.C. is one of about a dozen U.S. cities with a rapid transit system, and parking can cost up to $300 a month. Additionally, wait times for Uber and Lyft rides are rarely longer than a few minutes.
Parking is just one of the costs of owning a car these days. According to Kelly Blue Book, a Cox Automotive brand that tracks car prices, the average sticker price of a new car is above $50,000. Used carsalthough more affordable, they have also become more expensive. There’s also maintenance, insurance and, for many of us, the higher price of gas.
When my wife and I found our used Toyota Yaris L – that’s ‘L’ meaning the lowest-equipped model – we thought we were being as frugal as possible. We were able to buy the car without a loan. And my research suggested that even if repairs were needed, they wouldn’t be that expensive on a small, simple vehicle. If any car had a chance of matching Uber’s costs, it was this one.
But that didn’t happen.
After buying the car for $6,000, a year of car ownership cost us another $5,000.
That’s more than triple the $1,600 we spent on rideshare and rental cars the year before we bought the car.
Some costs were optional, such as $250 to have my transmission fluid drained and replaced as a preventative maintenance measure. But most of those costs were the basics: oil changes, gas, registration fees, insurance and tolls.
I haven’t stopped using Uber or Lyft either. I took a drive to many weekend bars with friends because parking was a hassle or because I wanted to drink.
Suddenly, free parking started to lose its luster. Our little sub-compact was more expensive than I expected.
However, perhaps there is more to it.
‘Ready to be driven in no time’
I’m just the latest person to compare whether owning a car makes sense in the age of ride-hailing apps. Even Sam Altman made the comparison a blog post back in 2014.
His conclusion: Using Uber was cheaper than driving his Tesla Roadster – at least it was when the thousand-year life subsidy made the rates on the app cheaper than they are now.
However, a strict cost comparison is not the way most of us think about car ownership, according to David Keith, associate professor of strategy at Melbourne Business School in Australia.
Keith is one of the authors of a 2021 study that asked drivers from major U.S. cities how much they would have to pay annually to give up their car.
The exact amount – $11,197 on average – wasn’t as interesting as why people said they valued owning a car. More than half of that amount, Keith and colleagues found, was “non-use value,” which includes the ability to take a car whenever you want, and a perceived status boost from owning a car.
In other words, drivers are happy with their car sitting unused most of the time. “I can walk outside, and there’s a box of metal sitting on the street, ready to be carted away at a moment’s notice,” he said.
I knew exactly what he meant.
For weeks after I bought my car, I had to change the way I thought about transportation. Questions like “How much do Uber rides cost?” and “Is my destination accessible by subway?” were replaced by a single statement: “Drive there now, stupid!”
There were also places I never would have visited without a car: Fredericksburg, Virginia, for example, for a day of antiquing, or rural Maryland to search the site of a Civil War camp with my metal detector. It feels great to be able to get into a car whenever you want. Those are trips that would have been difficult or impossible with Uber, and they’re the main reason my wife and I plan to keep our car, extra costs and all.
Recreating that freedom with modes of transportation you don’t own is an important aspect of reducing car ownership in the US, Keith told me.
Some places have tried. A company called MaaS Global – that’s ‘Mobility as a service’ – operated an app called Whim, which offered taxi rides, bike share and public transport as a bundle for a monthly subscription. Before MaaS Global, Whim was active in several European cities, including Helsinki and Vienna filed for bankruptcy in 2024 and ceased operations.
Meanwhile, car ownership in the US has remained stable over the past decades, even as Uber and Lyft alternatives to local bike share programs grow.
“All of these things are great, but none of them have really resulted in fewer cars in cities,” Keith said.
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