That's quite interesting, but I wonder if cars in garages could skew the data. Garages and garage size affect what cars can be kept in a garage (e.g., extended cab pickups might not fit), and also might be correlated to geography and affluence.
Probably, but not much. In my experience, the vast majority of garages in the US are used as storage for "stuff", not cars. This probably changes as people get wealthier and want to store their more expensive cars indoors (and can afford to put their miscellaneous stuff in paid storage if they'd like to).
Might also be different in urban cities where street parking is scarce and leaves your car more vulnerable to breakin.
If you care about your paint the garage is way better than leaving your car out in the sun in the south west. Not as annoying as clearing snow day to day but still a concern.
Hey, yep :-) I leave my vehicles out in the summer when all sorts of yard and other stuff is spread around the garage. But come mid-fall that all gets cleaned up so the cars can go in and let the plow do its thing. There's much less manual cleanup needed than if there's a car in the driveway.
You’ll certainly find people using garages for cars in places where you get snow and ice, and the temperature at night is below freezing.
Living in northern Wisconsin, for example, if you don’t park in a heated garage, snow and ice might not melt off your car for the entire winter. Parking in a garage means you won't have to scrape snow and ice off for 10 minutes standing in subzero weather. Parking outside, one also might need to plug the vehicle into an engine block heater on particularly chilly nights or risk the vehicle not starting in the morning.
In wealthy regions, the cars might frequently be missing from StreetView.
For example, in Woodside & Portola Valley (CA) most homes have garage or other off-street parking. A single home might house a Prius, a Hummer, a Volt, an extended cab F150 and a McLaren F1, all invisible from the street.
