The present study aims to grasp the car ownership characteristics of households in the sub-urban area in Makassar City, Indonesia. The study considers some exogenous characteristics of the households, such house types, family size, income, motorcycle ownership, trip number, and worker number. To construct the relationship between those characteristics and the car ownership, we applied the multinomial logit model approach. This study surveyed seven residential areas in the sub-urban area of the city. The survey conducted an interviewing method using a questionnaire sheet. The survey respondents as representative of the households, which selected randomly from the residential areas. The results show that the goodness of fit of the car ownership model is acceptable enough. Further, all of the exogenous variables significantly influence the households in car ownership. We expected that the results provide a basis for further studies such time valuation of car riders, mode choice model of the households, etc. © The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2018.