1. The US is much larger than the UK, with a lot of nothing/low population density.
2. Mentality might be different: I imported my current car used from the Netherlands; the country is tiny, but the Dutch seem really like driving a lot. I saw many cars with 30k miles per year on them.
Do people in the US really drive to through the country that often? I guess people drive maybe 2000-3000 km a year for holidays, e.g. to skiing resorts in winter or to Italy in summer, but even that isn't average.
I'd say most of the drives are commutes to work and shopping.
When everything is twice as far away, it adds up. My wife and I work from home and we still manage 10,000 miles a year on the car. That's driving kids to school (just a couple miles each way), going grocery shopping (10 miles each way), driving kids to swim lessons (10 miles each way), going to grandma's house (120 miles each way), our one vacation (150 miles each way)
There's also zero useful public transportation for us. If I worked in the city, I could take the train, but it's 4 miles to the train station.
I wouldn't claim knowledge; it's only an abstraction from local low density areas: Where I live people drive less (suburbia) than where I was raised (country side) because there's practically no point in driving 30km/19mi to do groceries if that could be done in town.
Now Germany has a population density of 621 people/mi². The US has a little less than 100. Assuming similar interconnectness (family, friends, jobs, holidays), travel distances are much larger.
I'm guessing daily commute from the suburbs on the freeway is common in the US. In Europe, population is more densely packed in cities, so commutes are shorter and can often be done via public transit. For example, I've been averaging 5k miles per year in Poland, and most of it is vacations and other long range trips.
50 miles a day is 25 miles each way. At Freeway speeds that is a half hour commute. It really isn't that unreasonable when put into that perspective.
There are lots of other reasons to think it is unreasonable, but from the perspective of someone who sees their trip to work as half an hour it doesn't seem bad.
What makes you say that? There are plenty of people with a 25 mile commute (40-60 minute drive). To work and then back home would easily cross 50 miles. I think the average daily commute by car in the US is 30+ miles.
1. The US is much larger than the UK, with a lot of nothing/low population density.
2. Mentality might be different: I imported my current car used from the Netherlands; the country is tiny, but the Dutch seem really like driving a lot. I saw many cars with 30k miles per year on them.