I am afraid you are wrong on this. Most US-ers love their cars, despite all the headaches their give them: traffic jams, parking shortages, mechanical breakdowns, high insurance and maintenance cost, being subjected to tight state regulation, arbitrary searches and seizures, forfeiture of their right to a jury trail, financial loss by theft and vandalism, an elevated risk of death of injury and so on. And despite the fact that you can have alternative means transportation at a fraction of the cost.
It does not make any sense from a rational point of view - but car ownership speaks to the reptilian rather than rational side of human brain (as one marketing research specialist put). This reptilian side has basically two primitive emotions: fear of everything that moves and aggression toward any perceived threat.
For most US-ers, car is a shell or a pod that separates them from the outside world and thus provides them a sense of false security and an instrument of attack and domination. I think those feelings are particularly pronounced in the US due to high level of alienation and generalized fear in this society.
By contrast, in Poland (the only other society I know well), car is predominantly a status symbol and a source of superiority and entitlement that comes with such high status. Unlike US-sers, Poles do not need to drive their cars, all they need is to own them. For, example, one of my ex-neighbors bought a car but did not have a driver's license, so she could not drive the damn thing. All she could do was to sit every day in her car and read a book, so all neighbors knew it was HER car. My old man loves cars because they stand for progress, modernity, development etc. that his engineering mind holds in high esteem, and always had one but hardly uses it. He takes a tram everywhere he goes, and drives the damn thing only for weekend excursions. He puts no more that 50-60 thousand kilometers (about 35 k miles) in the life of the car.
However, unlike the US, Poland is - or rather was until the so-called "democratic reform" - a relatively fear free society. People were not afraid of other people as the US-sers are, hence the need for sheltering oneself from the environment was mostly absent. Picking up hitchhikers (usually for a small fee) was (and I think still is) widely spread. Most white US-ers would consider that "far too dangerous" - however, Blacks (at least in Baltimore) who use that as an alternative to public transit (which sucks) and taxis (too expensive).
This comparison illustrates my point that car ownership in the US is not a rational choice of the means of transportation, but a response of irrational fear and need for security, and an equally irrational expression of passive aggression and domination. But very few people would admit such feelings publicly, they usually come with politically correct rationalizations (freedom, fun, convenience) supplied by marketing and pop-culture.
Wojtek