Let’s face it, as things age they need more work. . .

By Gary S. Vasilash

Although there is considerable attention paid by the industry and industry observers on new vehicle sales—for the former it is simply because that is where their money is made (or not) and for the latter, new things tend to be more interesting than things that have been around the block more than a few times—turns out that so far as the public is concerned, the vehicle they’ve had in their garage is probably going to continue to serve them for some time to come.

S&P Global Mobility has run the numbers based on registration information and discovered that the average age of cars and light trucks is at an all-time high: 12.6 years.

This means that the new-car smell that was wafting through the interior in 2011 may be gone but the set of wheels isn’t.

As of this past January, according to S&P Global Mobility, there were 286 million vehicles on the roads of the U.S. They term it “vehicles in operation” (VIO).

Of that, some 70% are between 6 and 14 years old. And that percentage will hold, it is calculated, for about the next five years.

And no vehicle analysis would be complete without looking at electric vehicles.

S&P Global Mobility says the average age of EVs in the U.S. is 3.5 years.

However, there is still some bullishness:

“We started to see headwinds in EV sales growth in late 2023, and though there will be some challenges on the road to EV adoption that could drive EV average age up, we still expect significant growth in share of electric vehicles in operation over the next decade.”– Todd Campau, aftermarket practice lead at S&P Global Mobility

But there is something that provides some perspective about the number of EVs on the road vis-à-vis the total VIO.

There are 3.2 million EVs in operation in the U.S.

That means 1.1% of the total VIO.

Given the amount of attention garnered you’d think that at the very least the decimal point would be shifted one place to the right.