The Average Portuguese Driver Loses More Than 12 Days a Year Behind the Wheel, a New Study Finds
A 15-country study commissioned by Autotrader finds Portuguese drivers spend the equivalent of 12 days and 15 hours a year in their cars — nearly six hours a week. Portugal ranks mid-table, above Spain but well below South Africa, in a reminder of how car-dependent life is outside Lisbon and Porto.
If you have ever suspected that your car quietly eats a chunk of your life, a new international study puts a number on it. The average driver in Portugal spends the equivalent of 12 days and 15 hours a year at the wheel — roughly five hours and 50 minutes every week — once you add up commuting, the school run, errands, visits to family and the occasional leisure drive. Over a year, that is nearly a fortnight of waking life spent looking through a windscreen.
The figures come from research commissioned by Autotrader, a British used-car marketplace, which surveyed drivers across 15 countries about how much time they spend in their vehicles. Portugal lands in the middle of the pack. South African drivers top the table by a wide margin at 23 days and one hour a year, followed by Ireland at around 16 days and Australia at 15 days and 11 hours. At the other end, drivers in the United Kingdom (10 days and 10 hours) and the Netherlands (just over 10 days) spend the least. Neighbouring Spain sits just below Portugal at 11 days and 17 hours.
What makes the Portuguese number striking is not that it is the highest — it is that it is so high in a country this compact. Portugal is smaller than most of the nations above it in the ranking, so the time cost says less about distance and more about how daily life is organised: dispersed suburbs, jobs concentrated in Lisbon and Porto, and public transport that thins out quickly once you leave the two big metropolitan cores. For many households in the interior and along the coastal commuter belts, the car is not a convenience but the only realistic way to get to work, school or a hospital.
That has a cost beyond time. Portugal has one of the older vehicle fleets in Western Europe, and running a car here means absorbing fuel duty, tolls on the motorway network, insurance, inspection fees and the annual circulation tax. For a country where wages remain below the EU average, the share of the household budget swallowed by simply keeping a car on the road is disproportionately heavy — and the nearly 13 days a year spent driving is time not spent working, resting or with family.
The study arrives as Portuguese cities push, unevenly, to loosen the car's grip. Lisbon and Porto have expanded metro and cycling networks, low-emission zones and pedestrian schemes, while the government has been dangling incentives for electric vehicles and public-transport passes such as the flat-rate national travel card. Yet outside the two big urban areas, the alternatives remain thin, and the survey is a reminder of how much ground those policies still have to cover.
For newcomers weighing life in Portugal, the takeaway is worth filing away. In central Lisbon or Porto you can plausibly live car-free, leaning on the metro, trams and an ever-growing web of buses. Almost everywhere else — the Algarve, the Alentejo, the Silver Coast towns that draw so many foreign residents — a car is close to essential, and with it comes a hidden line item measured not just in euros but in days. Nearly two weeks of them, every year.
