Cars for the Family

Been thinking about family bonding for a while now. I am doing a Malcolm Gladwell here but with no data whatsoever. (Purely based on the Blink philosophy :-)). I suspect that middle-class families (talking about India more than any other region) that have felt the need for spending on a car and therefore own a car may share a better relationship with each other than the families without one. I don't have any hard-core data but neither am I generalising the idea. I am somewhat confident that analysis of family-bonding in families with and without cars will prove that more families in the former category share a good bond. The reasons are obvious to me. The presence of a car generally means more outings(short and long), more trips together, more shared experiences, more joint-exploration of new places, more togetherness during travel etc. Let's ignore the embarrassment and the humiliation that the women generally go through while the men try and teach the former how to drive. Or for that matter, the frustrating experiences that some men may go through with the women doing the back-seat driving. :-) What do you think?

Please note that I am only talking about middle-class families and not the richer lot. The richer lot will probably have more than one car and well, the family culture per se may be quite different from that of middle-class families - Joint driving experiences may not necessarily have the same impact on rich families. Finally, in retrospect, I guess there are a few car companies that have perhaps leveraged on this concept in their advertisements.