It's hard to compare the tyranny of having to own a car to do basic things like shopping and working with the liberty having a car gives you.
I chose to live and work away from London when I graduated (from a London university) in 1984, and then I've pretty much needed to own a car from 1985 to 2018. My last job, in particular, I could not have done the same way without a car - 30 minutes to drive versus 150 minutes (two and a half hours!) the one time I used public transport.
But without a car I'd have done things differently.
I've pretty much always lived in a town or city so had no real use for a car other than work, and an earlier job required a car also.
After my stroke I couldn't drive and had to go to short outpatient appointments at Wythenshawe hospital. 3 hours round trip using public transport. Less than an hour including the appointment if driving.
My partner used to use the 130 bus to go to work in Didsbury. After my stroke he learned to drive, and had 60 minutes a day extra at home which had been spent waiting for buses and trundling through indirect routes.
But now I don't have a car, I don't miss it. We still have a car between us, although I rarely drive it - sometimes to take stuff to the tip, for example, which someone else mentioned above. I did go back to work and driving after my stroke, but after a couple more years I retired, and then I found my car wouldn't start more than once because of a flat battery through lack of use, so I sold it.
If I hadn't been able to drive, I couldn't have driven on holiday across miles of the west of the USA, which was wonderful. I don't think I could have hired cars without also owning them. In more recent times I indulged myself with more expensive cars than I "needed", but that's in part what having some money is about.
I used to be a cyclist, and of course I'm a pedestrian, and I have always thought that the balance of power between cars and others in built up areas is wrong in this country. It seems to work better in the USA. Is that because of litigation, or longer existence of significant numbers of cars there? Here too many drivers treat pedestrians and cyclists as irritants or even targets and get away with it. London seems to be better than either Wilmslow or Manchester in this respect, I feel that when I'm walking in London that the majority of drivers are more aware of me, for example at zebra crossings.
ON balance, I think car ownership has improved lives, but it leads in a direction of trade-offs which should not be made, and which have been. During my lifetime, since the 1960s, the design of roads and therefore the "interface" between drivers and cyclists/pedestrians has been wrongly too much in favour of drivers. I'm not hopeful that this is something which will change now, there are just too many words with no actions.