Published in BMC Public Health on 26 July 2025, with data collected between November 2024 and March 2025, the study asked a straightforward question: six years after women began driving in Saudi Arabia, is there any measurable difference in wellbeing between those who drive and those who do not?
It used established instruments rather than opinion questions — the DASS-21 for depression, anxiety and stress, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep, and the Fatigue Severity Scale.
The answer was no
Across mental health, physical health, sleep quality, depression, anxiety and stress, there was no statistically significant difference between women who drive and women who do not. Fatigue scores ran slightly higher among drivers, but not by enough to be significant.
Both groups sat in similar territory: moderate anxiety, moderate depression scores, and disturbed sleep — for drivers and non-drivers alike.
That is a duller headline than either side of the argument would have wanted, and it is worth sitting with. A great deal has been asserted about what driving does to women in this country, in both directions. On these measures, the answer appears to be: not much, one way or the other.
The one variable that did move
Commute length. Women whose journeys ran longer than thirty minutes reported higher anxiety, more sleep disturbance, higher depression scores and more fatigue than those with shorter journeys.
Not whether they drove. How long they were in the car.
What this does and does not prove
We are going to be careful here, because this is the point at which an article like this usually overreaches.
The study is correlational. It shows that longer commutes and worse wellbeing scores appear together. It does not establish that one causes the other, and there are obvious alternative explanations — people with longer commutes may live further out for financial reasons that carry their own stress, for instance.
The sample also has real limits, and the authors say so: 76.6% of participants were in Riyadh, 61.2% were between 17 and 30, and it was a convenience sample rather than a representative one. Nothing here is a Jeddah finding.
What it does do is put a number on something people already suspected, from a peer-reviewed source rather than a survey commissioned by someone selling something.
Why it lands differently in Jeddah
Jeddah's congestion level reached 27.2% in 2025 and the average driver lost 43 hours to rush-hour traffic over the year. Thirty minutes is not a long commute here. For a great many people it is the ordinary one.
Meanwhile the number of women making that commute keeps climbing. Saudi female labour force participation reached 36.3% in the first quarter of 2025, against 17% in 2017, and female unemployment fell to 9% by the first quarter of 2026 — a record low. More women in work, in a city where work means driving.
The part that is ours
We are not going to claim a car service fixes anyone's anxiety. That would be an insult to the research and to you.
What we will say is narrower and we think defensible. If the variable that matters is time in the car, then the things that add unplanned time to a journey are worth taking seriously: the car that will not start on the third attempt, the air conditioning that stopped working in July, the warning light you have been driving around for a month, the workshop visit that turns into three visits because nothing was diagnosed properly the first time.
None of that is dramatic. It is just time, taken in twenty-minute pieces, from people who did not have it.
For what a service visit with us actually involves — booking online, dropping the car, tracking the job from your phone rather than sitting in a waiting room — see car service for women in Jeddah. It is written plainly, including the part about what we do not have.