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For the individual owning the car, It is very high. When we take the societal costs into consideration, it is even higher.
- A paper from Gössling et al., 2019, "The Social Cost of Automobility, Cycling and Walking in the European Union", 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.12.016, via CityNerd (youtube video).
- Another paper by Gössling et al. in Ecological Economics, 2022 was really eye-opening. Over 50 years, the total lifetime cost of ownership of a "cheap" car will reach 600,000 EUR, out of which almost a third is effectively a subsidy from society to the car's owner. If you are considering owning your own car, I strongly recommend to at least skim this paper (CC license, HTML and PDF freely available).
- Another paper (Mattioli et al., Energy Research & Social Science, 2020), this is one is a review that considers our car dependence from a systems of provision approach. Quite interesting if you want to learn more about the of the political-economic underpinnings of car dependence (CC license, HTML and PDF freely available).
- A 2023 paper that tells how the car industry has deliberately pushed motorists into greater debt in order to save itself: The financialisation of car consumption. Nice summary in this Mastodon thread.
The Gössling paper generated some news items across the web, for example
- Kea Wilson, StreetsBlog USA, 2022. Takes an American perspective, which mainly means that everything gets worse.
- Carlton Reid, Forbes, 2022. Again, puts an American perspective on the numbers, but correctly states that "cars suck more cash than most people imagine".
I also remember a Youtuber doing a nice video on the Gössling paper, but I cannot recall enough about it to find it at the moment. Maybe I will find it later.