The objective of this paper was to analyse two activities: who rents a car and why? Which households share the driving of their cars? In order to do that, the Parc-Auto (Car-Fleet) database, built from annual postal surveys conducted with a panel of 10,000 French households, has been processed.Among approximately one hundred questions in the survey, two key questions have been crossed against many social, economic, demographic, geographicor time variables. KQ1: During the last 12 months, did you or another person from your home rent a car in France for personal purposes? KQ2: Is this car occasionally used by other persons? Here are the main findings. Renting households are mainly working, high income households, living in the core of big cities, and in particular in Paris. Most of them have two wage-sheets and two cars, one of which is generally a recent, high power, high quality car. Car rental is mainly an occasional practice. Yet for a minority of renters, it is a sustained habit. Households with more licence holders than cars share the most: about three quarters of them share their cars. On the contrary, single driver-single car households have less opportunity to share: only 15% share. Household car sharing shed light on the gender role within households: while 58% of the main users of the shared cars are male, 55% of secondary users are female. Household car sharing is mainly a regular practice. Finally, without diminishing the merits of innovative transport solutions proposed here and there, it is not a waste of time to give some insight on self established behaviour within households. This reveals that complex patterns have been built over time by the people themselves, to cope with diverse situations that cannot be easily handled by straightforward classifications. The car cannot be reduced to a personal object. Household car sharing also carries strong links with the issue of car dependency. Sifting car availability and choice universes may beuseful for fitting disaggregated models of sharing.
Samenvatting