The Auto(mo)Bil

  I read an article in the VästerbottensKuriren about the reasonableness of owning an electric car in the north, especially during negative temperatures. The article can be found here:  Are there the conditions for electric cars in Västerbotten?. 
Worth noting for the headline of this post is that Bil=Car in Swedish. 

I now drive approx. 100 km, 90 min back an forth every working day to work, and partly via the Autobahn.
That means I see a lot of cars and I have noticed a lot of electric cars, which I don't think I have seen in Sweden. On the other hand, if one is to be a little critical of the source, it might be due to the fact that I drive like 89 minutes more per day on average compared to when I lived in Sweden as well. Thus, I thought of a post about just that. But it didn't turn out that way once I started writing. But it's still about cars and road networks.

At the end of 2020, there were approximately 47.1 million registered passenger cars in Germany. That is enough for everyone in Sweden to get 4 each, with gear. 

At the same time, Germany's population was estimated to be about 83.2 million people, which gives us a figure of ≈0.57 cars per capita . If you look at the households, each household had about 1.45 cars per household. 

If you look during the same time period in Sweden, there were around 5.9 million registered passenger cars. Which gives us about ≈0.55 cars per capita , just below Germany. In contrast, there were only about 1.25 cars per household. 

If you go into the road network and try to make a comparison, Germany has slightly more paved kilometers... Their road network stretches over 650,000 kilometers, of which 13,000 of these belong to the well-known Autobahn (for those who didn't know, Autobahn means Autobahn or similar Car-rail). 

The total number of kilometers of roads in Sweden is just over 570,000 kilometers, of which approximately 2,720 kilometers are motorways (this also includes European roads). 

Since numbers are nothing if you don't look at them in relation to something, we can state: 

• Germany's land area amounts to approximately 357,400 square kilometers, which gives us approximately 1.81 km/km² . Of these, 0.0368 km/km² was motorway/Autobahn 
  
  
  
• Sweden's land area amounts to approximately 447,400 square kilometers, which gives us approximately 1.18 km/km² . Of these, 0.0045 km/km² was motorway. 12% of Germany's total motorway distance/km².  
  

On the whole, this can be seen as quite natural as Germany has almost 5 times the
population of Sweden. It places a lot of demands on the infrastructure and Germany has always been a car nation and a large producer of these as well. However, I can think it will be a bit skewed.
Of Germany's almost 50 million inhabitants, about 78% of the population live in large cities with a focus around Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt.

For Sweden, that figure is instead just under 50%, where Stockholm not entirely unexpectedly takes first place, closely followed by honorable mentions Gothenburg and Malmö. 

It is clear that Germany both has more cars in general, more cars per household and a larger road network. But if almost 37 million of these live in big cities, the need for own cars shouldn't be that high. Why does a people of almost 4 times the entire population of Sweden own a car? But everyone knows that Germans are very environmentally conscious people....
Sweden, a widespread country with sparse cities. Generally speaking, great need for freedom of movement and with arguments for a greater need for access to a car. 

If we want to comfort ourselves a little, I can throw in numbers that prove that Sweden has a larger railway network, given the size of the country. 

According to 2019 World Bank statistics, Sweden had a rail density of 0.43 kilometers of rail per square kilometer, while Germany had 0.23 kilometers of rail per square kilometer.