A free car contest sounds great -  until you find out the odds of winning

There are many different ways to drive a car absolutely free. The free car contest, also known as a free car sweepstakes, lets you enter a drawing for a car that they will give to you.

Free Surveys

There are contests where you complete a survey and then they enter you into a drawing for a car. The survey information requires personal information that includes your name, age, address, telephone number, marital status, education and current type of employment. They also ask what's going on in your life in the last half year and in the coming half year. They want to know what's going on in your life so they can market to your age group; things like if you plan to start a business, retire, go to school, have kids and the like. Based on the fact that there are so many online users submitting for free, the odds of winning are not very good.

Free Sweepstakes

Companies that want to build website traffic will routinely offer free sweepstakes to get you to come to their website. Once there, they hope that you look at the products they offer and decide to purchase (subliminally thinking that your odds will be better if you buy something from them). In reality, in order to remain legal, the odds are the same whether or not you buy any of their products.

An example of this is Publishers Clearing House. They have a sweepstakes for a $38,000 car and also show you the list of magazines you might want to subscribe to. And by the way, the odds of winning are listed as 1 in 310 million!

Paid Lottery

There are some companies that offer a car lottery. You pay a small fee in the hopes of winning the car. There are a lot of these that are set up as charitable events and the odds of winning are vastly superior to the free sweepstakes. The cars are sometimes donated by a car company so that the entire proceeds are given to the charity. Other times the difference between what the car cost and the money made from the number of tickets that were sold is donated.

I ran across an online version of this that does not donate their proceeds. For $35 you buy a lottery ticket that gives you a 1 in 8,500 chance of winning a $70,000 new car. The difference between $297,500 ($35 per ticket x 8500 tickets) and the cost of the new car ($70,000) leaves them with $227,500 - a nice chunk of change.

There are other ways to drive an absolutely free car other than by winning a free car contest.