The average car in the UK is now nearly ten years old.
Analysis by the RAC Foundation shows that as of the end of 2024, the average car on the country’s roads was nine years and 10 months old, the oldest it has ever been. This is up from seven years and five months a decade earlier, at the end of 2015.
When looked at by fuel type, petrol cars have the oldest average age at ten years and four months, followed by diesels at ten years and one month. The average plug-in hybrid was three years and four months old at the end of 2024. The average pure battery electric car was two years and six months old.
Of all the cars on the road at the end of 2024, more than two in five (40.7%) were at least ten years old. This compares with just one in three (32.7%) at the end of 2015.
Cars on the road
As of the end of 2024, there were almost 34 million licensed cars in the UK.
In 2024, 1.95 million new passenger cars were registered in the UK, up from a post-COVID low of 1.61 million in 2022 but below the peak of 2.69 million back in 2016.
The analysis was carried out to help inform the RAC Foundation’s Green Fleet Index, which tracks what proportion of UK car mileage is undertaken by zero-emission vehicles.
As of the end of 2024, zero-emission cars (almost universally pure battery-electrics but also including a tiny number of vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells) comprised just 3.8% of the national car fleet but drove 5.3% of all car mileage.
A mixed bag
“These findings probably reflect several things,” said Steve Gooding, Director of the RAC Foundation. “On the plus side, for motorists, the design and build-quality of modern cars means they are looking good and running reliably for far longer – the days of them rusting away before your eyes are well and truly behind us.
“Even a twenty-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,” he said.
The bad news for the environment is that the overall ageing of the fleet means the replacement of fossil-fuelled cars by those with very low or zero emissions is not happening as quickly as policymakers hoped, Gooding said.
“After they peaked in 2016, lower annual new car sales figures bear testament to a host of issues – Covid, the cost-of-living crisis, mixed messaging over the ban on the sales of new petrol and diesel models – plus the generally good roadworthiness of older cars meaning owners can comfortably adopt a wait-and-see approach as more new electric vehicles arrive in dealers’ showrooms and the public charging network grows.”
“To hit the Climate Change Committee’s 2030 emission reduction targets without a cut in the number of miles driven, we believe that by the end of the decade, there will need to be a tenfold increase in the 1.3 million or so battery electric cars on the road at the close of 2024. That is going to require a huge push,” Gooding said.
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