Or you can buy studio in the city and huge farm house with land 1 hour drive away... Then weekends spend in your farm house and weekdays in your studio... It would be close enough to pop in in week days also. 1 hour drive aint bad.
Single people don't want to spend their weekends alone in a farmhouse, and 3+ person families don't want to live the bulk of their time in a studio apartment. Meanwhile, that 300-500k dollar farmhouse could put your kids through private school or good colleges.
USDA agricultural statistics service
https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/E0F5EB36-3313-3D7B-...
Two hours is a long time! Sit around for the two hours doing nothing, you'll see.
As much as I like currently not having a commute, it was certainly not time that was "crumpled and thrown away".
http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/al...
I, like you probably, think that it's not "too bad", but once you're away from this practice, you'll realize that you were wasting so much valuable time.
It's much better to separate it out than try to combine it in one suburban house.
This is far less true in regions with snow. Assuming you drive the vehicle in the winter, a non-trivial contribution to "wear and tear" on the car is rust which occurs even if the car isn't driven a lot. (Cars are far better in this respect than they used to be but rotted out fluid lines etc. is still very much a thing.)
If you only drive 5,000 miles a year, sure, but that's not typical.
Newish used cars with ~200k on them are usually good buys because often times it's someone who used it for work (salesperson, etc.) and just ground out the highway miles (which are nearly free from a wear and tear perspective)
If we somehow manage to magically share a car, it's not going to last a lot longer than if we're wearing out our own cars at our respective rates (mine faster than yours).
But you reinforce the point that the car sitting in the parking lot or garage is not simply an over-provisioned resource by reason of being idle. If your usage patterns are so different than mine it's unrealistic to expect a configuration where we would be able to share a car.
Car-sharing has many benefits, but a car is still worth more than two half-cars.
most common things expat complain here about - 1) going out becomes a rare experience if you are not single - just too expensive compared to anywhere else in the world; 2) the need for adjustment to swiss ways of doing everything (ie strict rules of living in apartments, massive bureaucracy and so on) - you need to change, they won't; 3) finding accommodation is often as hard as landing a job (which is often super hard, too much global competition) - they just don't build new housing, so prices went through roof and your resume and salary and skin color and nationality and no-pets-no-small-kids and everything needs to be perfect, otherwise goodbye. since there are 100-200 other people applying for same place; 4) having kids is prohibitively expensive, international schools are either paid by your employer or you put your kid to (good) public ones. You need to be seriously well-off for kids, or compromise on couple of things.
I live in Geneva, I love it here, but I am not here for salary. You can get much more value for your salary elsewhere in Europe for doing same job as here. Munich, London and couple of other places would work better. But I am a mountain freak, having Chamonix as 45 minute drive from apartment is priceless for weekends and having France 2 kms away makes spending a bit more bearable.