Interesting. It might be an effect of increased car quality (good), tight consumer finances (bad), or some fuzzy combination of both.

Given that savings rates have fallen recently ... I feel pessimistic enough to think that the second factor cannot be discounted.

Lucas, if cars are 9 years old they were bought at the beginning of Clinton's second term. Politics has nothing to do with it. Well built foreign cars have been stealing market share, and the U-S majors have begun to close the quality gap despite slumping sales. Plus with 0% financing everwhere on new cars, major auto dealerships make more money in the used car market when they get 8-10% interest. Honda Certified pre-owned ring a bell? Later chief.

Having more and more older -- and therefore dirtier -- cars on the road is a concern. However, this development is not automatically bad simply because of differences over time in pollution control technology.

First, cars produced in 1995 were not overwhelmingly dirty, even by today's standards. Some of the SUVs create a little more concern, though. Regular emissions testing, which many states make part of yearly registration renewal, can catch those cars whose emissions control devices have broken down.

Second, changes in the fuel supply, such as the introduction of 10% ethanol oxygenated fuel, RFG, low-sulfur diesel, biodiesel and E85 (FFVs started hitting the roads in 1998) contribute significantly to lowering smog and air pollution, and are not dependent on the age of the car.

Finally, for every car that is retained in the fleet instead of scrapped and replaced by a new car, we save the considerable amount of energy, resources and pollution which all go into the manufacturing process. I do not have the figures on hand to estimate the amount of pollution ordinarily released by smelting steel, machining car parts, creating the plastics and interior fittings, using chemicals for paints and varnishes, etc., but I imagine that the pollution associated with all that is substantial.

One concern that was not addressed before is this: How many retained cars are actually serving in place of new cars that would have been bought to replace scrapped units? That is, how many car purchases were actually deferred? How many old cars, by contrast, are serving to enlarge the fleet? That is, if they were scrapped, a new car would not have been bought to replace them.

Old cars could serve as "third cars" to families that bought their most recent new car "right on schedule" (at their usual whatever-year interval), but find that their old car still works well enough not to be worth throwing away. They could be living on with new owners who would otherwise not have been able to afford a car (or a second family car), but found that a modern, ten year old car with 150,000 miles on it costs less than $1000 but actually still has some life left in it. Importantly, how much does the availability of these extra cars contribute to the number of miles annually driven in America?

If truck median age is only 6.8 years and car is 9 years it means these guzzlers may be putting on 32% more miles per year than cars. Hybrid drives systems would have much greater effect if used in trucks instead of cars that already get 25-30 mpg without hybridization.

This is most likely due to the fact that the GM/Ford/etc "employee discounts for everyone" instantly devalued almost all the GM/etc cars out there... financial pressure NOT to buy another one, if your tradein is lower.

2nd, as others have mentioned, your average joe's discretionary spending has gone down noticably over the past few years. Think of skyrocketing healthcare and transportation (gas) costs, combined with a flat wage increase, means people are spending more just to subsist than years before.

Plus, GM/Ford/etc are not exactly doing that well, and this kind of shows why.

All in all, I see this as a longterm trailing indicator of consumer spending power... and it's trending down.

When I went to grad school in Hawaii, 1964, we had a visiting mathmetician working on population projections. He used car statistics to test his math. He said at that time, the average age of cars was 13.3 years. Further, he stated that the average age was independent of year of manufacture, country of manufacture, and cost of the car.

I have been trying to find statistics to verify his observations. The few studies I have found indicate he was right. Why don't we have national survival rates?
I would like to find our if we do have statistics on average survival ages of vehicles.

Bill

Yo, Mark & Bill yall should know that stats from HI are only for HI, and can't be used as an indicator for national stats, but must be rolled into all states. Everything that haps in HI is HI specific. When I was there for 7 yrs in the 80's welding and picking up a couple of degrees when I finally bought a car it was a 73 Dodge. 3 more cars were 70's & the last was 81 Le Mans [I think], & only 'cause KKR took Dillingham private & my wife worked for Big D & I gotta steal. People in HI don't scrap cars unless they must. Don't forget it COSTS you, since the 80's anyway to scrap a vehicle in HI. But how about this for people haning onto cars nation wide: they're tired of all the binging, bonging, talking that cars now do. I know I dislikne spending an hour+ reprogramming the fascist little buggers, & I'm not upgrading unless all that crap can be defeated, permanently, before purchase.

I am always searching online for articles that can help me. There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points in Features also. Keep working, great job! Shop here