The rapid development of economy in China provides huge development space for private cars. The research of car ownership is a fundamental work for urban planning and social development. Forecasting is always one of the main objectives in time series analysis. Accurate forecasting of car ownership is of great significance for urban development, transportation planning and sustainable development in China. This paper uses trend extrapolation to forecast the future private car ownership in China and evaluates the forecasting accuracy. The results show, by 2020, the private car ownership is expected to more than 100 times that of 1999, if we do not adopt appropriate policies to control the car ownership. Compared with previous work, this paper gives better prediction results and the corresponding suggestions.
