The average car in the UK is the oldest it has ever been. That’s the headline from the RAC Foundation, which has found that, as of the end of last year, the average car in the UK was nine years and 10 months old.
Nearly a decade ago, at the end of 2015, the average age of a car was only seven years and five months. For petrol and diesel cars, perhaps obviously, their average age is even older: 10 years and four months and 10 years and one month respectively.
Pluggable cars are much younger. What’s the cause? The RAC Foundation thinks a few things. For one, cars are able to last longer.
“The days of them rusting away before your eyes are well and truly behind us,” said Steve Gooding, the transport research charity’s director. “Even a 20-year-old car with a full service history can be a good bet for someone seeking a bargain buy that still looks up to date.”
I know this to be true. The average age of my family’s four daily drivers is just under 20 years old, none of them has needed any welding, and yet with minimal servicing we expect the Audi, Volkswagen and Mazda to pass an MOT test without much bother (the Land Rover Defender, as something of a specialist grotbox, is a little different, but nothing it has needed so far has been structural).
But the underlying truth is that an ageing fleet is inevitable when new car sales aren’t keeping pace with two other things: the number of people in the country and likelihood of them owning a car, both of which have increased steadily through this century.
In 2000, there were approximately 0.48 vehicles on the road for every person in the UK. By the middle of 2024, that was 0.57 vehicles. (I say ‘approximately’ because it will be slightly higher: the total number of cars registered in Northern Ireland wasn’t logged until 2014, so those aren’t included in the calculations. There are now about a million.)
In 2000, the UK population was 58.9 million, and between us we drove 28.6 million vehicles. By 2024, those figures had risen to 69.2 million people and 40.1 million vehicles: 40.2% more vehicles spread between 17.5% more people.
Of course, then, cars are getting older, because, like houses or GP appointments, there aren’t enough new ones to go around. It’s a story, I guess, of the success of the car: it remains not just an object of desire but must also be the lowest-cost, most flexible form of transport for vast numbers of people.
But it also seems to be a story of so much else failing catastrophically. Are rail and bus services 17.5% better than they were at the turn of the millennium to accommodate the population growth and give those who don’t really want to drive an alternative?
If you can’t get a seat on an expensive train in the day and it doesn’t run at night (notwithstanding the fact that it might not go from where you are to where you want to go when you want to go there), it’s no wonder that you will drive a car.
Yet have you then noticed a 40% increase in major road capacity so that those who do need to drive can? No, nor have I. Road agencies have had to try to find ways (smart motorways, traffic lights on roundabouts, roving traffic officers) to fit more cars into the same amount of space, but I fear it’s a losing battle when we’re talking these numbers.
And when that doesn’t work and roads are overcapacity, as so many are, it takes longer to go anywhere. So productivity stalls, that limits tax money for infrastructure investment and so the cycle goes on.
All recent governments have had some kind of build-related slogan (‘build, build, build’ in 2020, ‘build, baby, build’ this year), but they have mostly been focused on houses, seldom the need to travel quickly and cheaply between those and our places of work and fun.
So the gradual ‘enshittification’ of longer journey times and lousier infrastructure goes on. It’s the vibe one feels, all encompassed by one simple statistic: cars are getting older. At least they are up to the task.