People in southeast Asia have motorcycles or trikes (taxis) despite having comparatively much lower income. In China most households own a motorbike. Clearly motor transport is highly desirable and borderline "needed" to keep up the kind of industrial society that can maintain their population, healthcare systems, fertilizer production, life saving pharmaceutical production, etc. Many people would simply starve if motor vehicles could not facilitate the movement workers and goods necessary to maintain these populations.

Having avidly driven both motorcycles and cars, I can tell you the safety a car provides you is not just a luxury. It's a a way to protect your children from higher chances of death in transit. In some states in the US transporting the family on a motorcycle would simply be illegal, as they mandate minimum age for riding on the kind of vehicles that one can legally transport their family on (in Asia the family is often times 3+ up on the same tiny motorbike).

I suggest you work on repealing transportation child safety and emissions laws if you want to bring us closer to Asia. Families do not need the spoiled luxury of these foolish safeguards.

Lots of countries in Asia have a variety of taxi-style transport services that make owning a car not as necessary.

For example, just in India alone you can hitch a ride on a bicycle rickshaw, auto-rickshaw, taxi, bus, train or subway. It's pretty easy to get around anywhere without having to drive, but this is also only possible because labor costs are so absurdly low (and of course, generally not that great for the drivers), with costs for private rides on the first 3 often comparable to public transport costs in the US.

Plus, Europe and Asia are generally more densely populated than the US, so having a car is a status symbol in that it shows that you can afford a safe place to keep a car. Meanwhile, outside of big cities like NYC (where car ownership is similarly a bit of a luxury), people easily have room to safely park one car per family member.

These are all heavily intertwined factors though, just as owning a car isn't as much of a status symbol in less densely populated areas, owning a car is less necessary in more densely populated areas.

In most of the US a car is a necessity. Public transport is either non-existant or so badly done it is effectively unusable.

It's not really "spoiled", as that is the price due to the fuel taxes in Europe, where the U.S. pays almost nothing in fuel tax. If they don't like that high of a fuel price, then they're free to vote for another party.