Nowadays, there are over three million mobile applications (apps) are available from public app stores and about five million app developers in the world. This study chose car-related mobile apps (car apps) for examining their persuasiveness. Car apps with persuasive design would attract users’ interests and bring about regular usage in driving or managing a car. This research consists of two studies, dealing with five research questions: ①.What is the current status of car apps?②.What are the persuasive design characteristics of current car apps?③.Do car users perceive the persuasiveness of the car app?④.What types of behavior change will happen after using a car app?⑤.Do users showing different types of behavior change perceive differently the persuasiveness of the car app?Study 1 attempts to answer the first two questions and Study 2 deals with the remaining three questions. Study 1 has proceeded in two steps. The first step was to collect about seven hundred car apps published on Apple’s App Store and Google Play and to classify them on the basis of their functionality into eight categories: news & basic information about car, buying & selling, driver’s communication, location service, safe driving service, A/S & maintenance management, renting service, and car expenses monitoring. Most apps are in four categories: car news & basic information (28%), locating service (23%), car rental service (15%), and safe driving service (12%). The apps that are directly involved with car driving and car management account for 63%. The inter-rater reliability (κ=0.886) shows that this categorization of car apps proved to be acceptable. However, multiple apps are too homogeneous, i.e. too similar in their main functions. Only a few apps are designed to be more comprehensive and have functions in two or more categories. In the second step, this study evaluated each car app on the basis of 28 persuasive design principles identified by Oinas-Kukkonen and Harjumaa. After all, this study found nine persuasive design principles such as reduction, trustworthiness, real-world feel, self-monitoring, personalization, reminder, suggestion, expertise, and verifiability. In order to check the reliability of this evaluation, this study developed a guideline for examining persuasive design principles of car apps and recruited four other evaluators. They were trained to apply the guideline and given thirty five car apps for evaluation. In order to check the inter-rater reliability, this study calculated Fleiss’ Kappa whose value was 0.782, over the excellent criterion of 0.75. In Study 2, a quasi-experiment with pretest-posttest design was devised and used. After two rounds of expert screening, three sets of questionnaires were developed. One is for measuring the existence of nine persuasive design principles and the other two is for measuring participants’ behavior change before and after using a car app. One hundred and nine participants were recruited and given a car app for a two-week period. The analysis result shows that participants clearly perceived eight persuasive design principles: reminder, self-monitoring, real-world feel, expertise, suggestion, verifiability, personalization, and trustworthiness. The analysis also identified four types of behavior change: “Green-Dot”, “Green-Span”, “Blue-Span”, and “Black” in terms of Fogg’s Behavior Wizard model. The participants in four behavior change groups showed different perception levels for eight persuasive design principles. This study focused on behavior change after using a car app that assist users in driving or managing their vehicles and established a process for examining the interrelationship between mobile app’s persuasive characteristics and behavior change. The results from this study can be utilized by car app developers and automakers in order to develop more effective and more persuasive car apps.