Analyzing car ownership in two Quebec metropolitan regions: a comparison of latent ordered and unordered response models Sabreena Anowar · Shamsunnahar Yasmin · Naveen Eluru · Luis F. Miranda-Moreno Abstract Private car ownership plays a vital role in the daily travel decisions of individuals and households. The topic is of great interest to policy makers given the growing focus on global climate change, public health, and sustainable development issues. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most researched transportation topics. The extant literature on car ownership models considers the influence of exogenous variables to remain the same across the entire population. However, it is possible that the influence of exogenous variable effects might vary across the population. To accommodate this population heterogeneity in the context of car ownership, the current paper proposes the application of latent class versions of ordered (ordered logit) and unordered response (multinomial logit) models. The models are estimated and compared using the data from two Canadian cities of the province of Quebec: Montreal and Quebec City. The latent class models from the two regions offer superior data fit compared to their traditional counterparts clearly highlighting the presence of segmentation in the population. The validation exercise using the model estimation results further illustrates the strength of the latent class models for examining car ownership decisions. In terms of the comparison exercise, the latent class unordered response models consistently outperform the latent class ordered response models for the two Quebec regions examined. Keywords Car ownership in the Canadian context · Latent class models · Latent ordered logit · Latent multinomial logit S. Anowar · S. Yasmin · N. Eluru ( ) · L. F. Miranda-Moreno Department of Civil Engineering & Applied Mechanics, McGill University, Room 492 Macdonald Engineering Building, 817 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 0C3, Canada e-mail: naveen.eluru@mcgill.ca