We bought a house recently here in Scotland and we must have looked at 20 houses before choosing the one we bought - all occupied houses had garages and not one was being used to house a car - they were mostly full of random junk.
Amusingly one house that wasn't currently occupied did have a car in its garage - a rather shiny and unused looking Lamborghini.
We ended up buying a house without a garage as we really don't need to collect more junk and our cars do fine outside. Only thing I did check was that it would be feasible to install a electrical charging point so I can finally look at getting an electric car!
[Edit: As expected of a British male of a certain age I am rather looking forward to finally owning my own shed and possibly a greenhouse].
In Santa Barbara, CA, where I live, each home must have two covered parking spaces, and the city will investigate and require you to empty out your garage if it is too full to hold cars and you don't have a carport or other covered parking.
I believe the overarching goal is to prevent the neighborhoods from becoming ones where there are two cars parked visibly in every driveway. The city desires that cars are stored out of sight or attractively under a carport. I don't think they'd approve a permit for a plain ugly covered parking structure that sat over the driveway area (not compliant with setback rules at least). As such, you end up with either cars in garages, parked out of sight behind the home, or in an attractive carport adjacent to the home (which probably only allows a single car). Cars parked on the street have to be moved every 72 hours, so that's not an option either.
Old cars never really fit in garages that well either.
My father had both a 1954 Chevy an a 1963 for truck. In one house, built in 1918, the old car could be guided into the 1-car garage with the help of a couple people. There was just enough room to slide around the car.
Later on, they built a new house and extended the garage for the old car to fit. The truck didn't fit in either garage. The newer cars seemed to fit slightly better, though still tight.
Also in Scotland, currently in the final week of living in this house, and I've discovered a few things during my house hunting travels. News from builders is that new builds aren't built to have a 'proper' garage - they're built to have a storage garage, to the point that a modern larger variety car won't fit.
Couple that with modern cars being bigger than they were 40 years ago means that your average Wimpey home from the 70's won't have a large enough garage.
Builders also resist building out, in favour of building up in order to get more from the tranche of land.
My wife and I despise most cookie cutter new builds, but we took a tour around a new build estate for a laugh one day... postage stamp gardens, no hammerheads for turning a car, and a driveway large enough for one car. We had to use someones driveway to turn the car around... and these are 'spacious 4 and 5 bedroom homes' on offer for £400+k
Housing in the UK really is pitiful. We have some of the smallest homes in the world these days.
The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet.
I was amazed to see brand new build lovely houses on sale that had no broadband availability - and this was maybe 20 mins from Perth.
> The catch in Scotland is finding a house that is both a decent size, has a decent sized garden, is commutable to somewhere that has high tech jobs and actually has a half decent connection to the Internet.
That may be asking for too many mutually exclusive interests. If you want a large house then you're going to increase the commute. If you want a lot of high tech jobs then living spaces nearby are going to be at a premium.
Och yes - nothing specific to Scotland about those trade-offs.
Availability of decent Internet bandwidth is completely unpredictable though - one house in a rural area might be 2Mbps and another house 1km away (and no closer to a town) might, in one extreme case we found, get 450Mbps and nobody could explain to me why this was the case!
I keep my table saw at the local makerspace, along with most of my other tools, and the tools all the other members have chosen to share. I go visit them whenever I want to work on something; in the meantime my house stays tidy. It's a great system.
I have a "two" car garage that is wide enough for one car, but not quite for two. Plent of room on the empty side for power tools, bike storage, lawn mower and the snow blower.
Perhaps things have changed since I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, but back then it worked exactly the opposite way: once you get used to using your garage as a storage unit, you won't go back to parking your car indoors.
I think the 21st century trend is more that garages will shrink and in some cases disappear because "once you get used to not needing to own a car, you won't want to go back". Car ownership is growing rapidly less essential for people who live in big cities and can afford to use uber/lyft for personal mobility and delivery services instead of going out for errands.
I don't think the garage will go away, but I do think we won't store transportation in there - especially if we happen to get mass transit to everyone via self-driving cars or something like that. (Obviously fantasy, but you get the drift).
The garage is so much more than car storage, though - as many others have pointed out, it makes for a grand workshop.
