This study focuses on the impact of life-course events on car ownership and, ultimately, on travel behavior to provide a basis for measures influencing people toward a more sustainable mobility. The theoretical background for the analysis is the mobility biographies approach. This approach assumes that travel behavior is mainly habitual, and therefore, only relatively seldom do windows of opportunity open for behavioral changes when travel decisions are considered more intensively. Car ownership is used in the analysis as a proxy for actual travel behavior. Hence, the results may deliver some insight on the effect of key events in a person's or household's life on travel behavior and, further, the potential of soft policy intervention measures to change daily mobility. The German Socioeconomic Panel is used for the empirical analysis. The results show the importance of life-course events for travel behavior. Besides the household status variables of age, number of cars, and weighted monthly income, four key events have a strong impact on car ownership growth: the changing number of adults in a household, birth of the first child, changing weighted monthly income, and change of residence from a regional core to a regional core area. Expected influences from relocations with a spatial structural change have not been proved so far.