SummaryEphemeral social vehicular networks allow for short‐lived communications between occupants. While such transient interactions may provide important usage benefits such as traffic warnings, the reality of short‐lived interactions also poses challenges for deciding to participate in such social networks. In this paper, we develop a game‐theoretic model to understand the role of occupants' incentives to contribute to these ephemeral social networks. We rigorously study the properties of the model and resulting equilibrium outcomes. A further key objective of our work is to evaluate the robustness of our model to different notions of intrinsic motivation for network participation. As a baseline case, we assume that users are homogeneous regarding their motivation. Next, we investigate the impact of different motivational distributions and explore their impact on users' behaviors in a comprehensive simulation setup. We identify the circumstances under which ephemeral social networks are viable and can successfully sustain an increased level of network participation.