New research by the RAC Foundation has highlighted an overlooked obstacle to the UK’s transition to emission free motoring: Internal combustion engined cars are lasting a lot longer than they used to.
Ten years ago, the average age of a car on the UK’s roads was seven years and five months. That average has grown by nearly two and half years, to nine years and ten months.
Taken in isolation, petrol cars are the oldest vehicles on the road, with an average age of ten years and four months. The figure for diesels is ten years and one month.
Unsurprisingly, battery electric cars average just two years and six months, with plug-in hybrids three years and four months.
These figures represent the scenario at the end of 2024, at which point just over 40% of cars on the road were over ten years old. This compares with just 32.7% a decade earlier.
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.
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said: ‘These findings probably reflect several things. 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.
‘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 policy makers hoped.
‘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.’
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