Most car registration and licensing laws were passed with a view to simply regulate automobile safety on the public streets in the least intrusive manner possible and to raise just enough revenue to pay for the enforcement of those laws.
My experience is that gun registration, permit and licensing laws are promoted by prohibitionists with a view to make it as hard as possible to own a gun short of outright prohibition. Read their venom: they hate guns, they want to repeal the Second Amendment and they loath NRA. At least FDR's Attorney General Homer Cummings was honest about the 1934 National Firearms Act, federal registration and $200 tax (in 1934 dollars) on pistols, concealable rifles and shotguns, machineguns, and silencers: he wanted to prohibit them, but his interpretation of the Second Amendment was he could not outright ban, so he wanted a tax and register law that amounted to defacto prohibition. Pistols were removed from the NFA before it passed (NRA is blamed for that). We must remember that the Australian confiscation and destruction of 600,000+ semi-auto and pump-action long guns in 1996 was only possible because they were first registered with the government.