• car ownership
• socioeconomic status

It has consistently been shown in the UK that those living in households with access to a car have lower mortality rates than those without household car access.¹ It has usually been inferred from this that car ownership is a good marker of material living standards,² and it has therefore been incorporated in several measures of area deprivation. It is often used in epidemiological studies as a measure of socioeconomic status in the absence of good data on income or occupational social class. Increasing attention has recently been given to a life course approach to socioeconomic determinants of health, with various indicators including car ownership being used to measure early in life conditions.³ The way in which the meaning of car access, …