There is a wide range of possibilities on how you can digitize your household. But does this make your life really easier? Or is this just a luxury toy you like to show off when your friends come over like with your score at National Casino?
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The availability of selected consumer durables in private households in Germany can also be used to some extent to make statements about the material standard of living of these households. The selected consumer durables include, for example, vehicles, household appliances, consumer electronics goods and information and communications technology products such as cell phones and PCs.
Vehicles
The Current Economic Accounts provide information on the level of equipment of private households in Germany with bicycles and passenger cars (passenger cars) and thus on the possibilities of households to be mobile.
At the beginning of 2019, there were 68.3 million bicycles in the total of 37.9 million private households in Germany. The equipment level has remained constant at around 80% since 2003 (2019: 79.3%). Electric bicycles in the form of pedelecs are on the rise: Private households owned a total of 4.5 million pedelecs at the beginning of 2019. There was one such electric bike in 9.0% of households. Five years earlier, the equipment level had been just 3.4 %.
Households where children live are best equipped with bicycles. Single parents and couples with children owned 88% and 93% of bicycles, respectively. Couples without children were only slightly above the average of 79% at 82%. Of the single-person households, 70% owned at least one bicycle.
Bicycles are usually available more than once in households. Of the 30 million households with bicycles, a good third had exactly one bicycle. Another third owned two bicycles and another third owned three or more bicycles. In purely arithmetical terms, a bicycle household owned an average of 2.3 bicycles.
Further developments
It is already clear that smart technologies and digitization can no longer be assigned to individual areas. Does the smart washing machine now belong to the household or to the smartphone, if the information is sent to it? And what about the smart gym? Is it where the tablet of the TV set is or is it constantly with it because it also runs on the smartwatch or on the smartphone and is with it when jogging?
In the coming years, there will still be the basics that digitize the apartment or house. However, many of these elements will be taken along in the form of apps or wearables and will be with us all the time. There have long been trial runs on garments that carry smart technology, including health features, in their fibers.
Car: yes or no? New or used? At the beginning of 2019, 77% of private households in Germany had at least one car. Around 49 % of private households owned one or more used cars, while 33 % of households had at least one new car, i.e. a car that was brand new at the time of purchase. The proportion of households with leased cars was 4.4%.
NO LONGER JUST FOR NERDS
Smart homes are no longer purely for tech experts or tech lovers. So quite a few devices are even in households that would never acquire such a thing. Like the programmable coffee machine or the one that reacts to an external influence. However, the full networking of all areas is still not affordable for most people or only available at great expense. But the low-cost alternatives may not disappear into the walls, but they offer the same benefits.