I find your 17 years as the average lifespan of a motor vehicle in the US to be unbelievable.
According to a new report by S&P Global Mobility, the combined average age of passenger cars and light trucks has now reached a record high of 12.6 years.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60882953/average-age-us-cars-trucks-suvs-rises/
Iām not sure what the argument is about. Itās very easy to calculate. There are 283 million registered vehicles in the USA. And out of that 283M, about 5M are EVs. That leaves 278M to switch to EV by some date. Since about 15 million new vehicles are sold each year, if we instantly change over to ALL EV today, then 283M / 15M = about 19 years. So, if we switch over to only selling EV right now, letās say over the next 14 days, so we can start out 2025 selling only EVs, then in 19 years, all the vehicles in the USA will be EV. Thatās 2044. And thatās the best case that all cars sold are EV starting in 2 weeks from now. If we increase production of EVs to 30M a year, then itāll only take about 10 years, and itāll be in 2035.
But in the real world none of that will happen. We will sell 1 or 2 million EVs in 2025/26/27, rising to 3-4 million in 2028/29/30/31, rising to 5-6 million in 2032/33/34/35, and then itāll slowly rise from there, it wonāt be until 2050 or likely even later that almost all vehicles will be EV (or whatever better technology might eventually win over the generally inefficient internal combustion engines that we use today).
If the average age on the road is ~12 years wouldnāt the average lifespan be more like 24 years?
For every 1 year old car on the road there has to be a ~23 year old one to make the average about 12ā¦or am I missing something here? Alternatively, you could have a 1 year old car and two 17.5 year old cars.
Edit: I should note that averages donāt really work well mathematically for this. For every 30 year old car you need one -6 year old car (to get to an average of 12), which you canāt haveā¦and we know we have fewer older cars than newer ones so the average age gets skewed a bit to a higher number from all the old cars, depending on how they collect the data.
Mike
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60882953/average-age-us-cars-trucks-suvs-rises/
Your 283 million registered vehicles includes buses, motorcycles, heavy duty trucks. A better number is 119 million:
Total number of vehicles registered to U.S. households is 119 million. Average age is 12.6 years/veh. Average number of vehicles purchased is 15.5 million veh/year.
119,000,000 veh / 15,500,000 veh/year = 7.7 years
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/how-many-cars-are-in-the-us.html
There can not be more than 15 million new cars per year, but there are 104 million used cars that can average 14 years.
[(15m)(1yr ) +(104m)(14 yr)] / 119m = 12.4 yr
P.S. - There are In the United States, around 12ā15 million vehicles reach the end of their useful life each year. These vehicles are then recycled for their metal and other recyclable materials.
P.S. - there are over 6 million passenger car accidents in the U.S. every year.
I like your method of approaching the issue (arithmetic) but real world adoption follows an āSā curve. It would be interesting to discover where in the āSā curve EV adoption is at present. I believe that some people still use horse powered buggies (hay and oats are bio fuels). 
Two driving force in EV adoption are the falling prices of batteries and the longer lifetimes of modern batteries making EVs more affordable with less range anxiety.
The distribution? Itās not a straight line.
The Captain
I was going to say.
My dadās 2015 Honda Accord is rusting out. Honda fixed that problemā¦sureā¦the problem is still with us.
Why is that unbelievable? The average lifespan of vehicles is always going to be a much higher number than the age of the average vehicle. If the average age of passenger cars and light trucks on the road is about 13 years, it means that a fair number of them are older than 13 years - because new cars get sold all of the time.
Rough illustration - the average age of a person in the U.S. is about 38 years old. The average lifespan at birth is about 77 years.
Per wikipedia, the average lifespan of a car in the US is just under 17 years and about 160K miles.
I kind of described an S-curve in my last paragraph. Approximately double every 4 years until growth tapers off somewhat. Could be faster, could be slower, but it wonāt be 10 times as fast.
Poor reference! Here is a much more reliable reference and study:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a60882953/average-age-us-cars-trucks-suvs-rises/
Again, thatās average age. Which is different than average lifespan.
The average age of someone in the US is about 38 years old. The average lifespan of someone in the US is about 77 years.
The average lifespan of a car in the US will always be different (and greater) than the average age of cars on the road.
This is nonsense. There werenāt 104m new cars sold 14 years ago.
Mike
My wife and I are not average. But weāve got a 18yo car (175k miles) and a 14 yo car (130k miles). Iām not expecting to replace either for several years as they are both running fine.
I hope you do not have any accidents which would cause your old cars to be totaled by the insurance company.
You misunderstand. 104 million is the total number of registered cars and light trucks on the roads currently that are older than one year.
My reference said that there are total of 119 million registered cars and light trucks on the road currently. Their average age is 12.6 years.
So why did you multiply 104 by 14? The proper calculation is -
number cars bought 1 year ago, 15 x 1 +
number cars bought 2 years ago x 2 +
number cars bought 3 years ago x 3 +
ā¦
number cars bought 14 years x 14
= TOTAL CAR YEARS
then TOTAL CAR YEARS / 119M cars = average age of all cars (under 14 years old) on road
The more correct way to do it is to use ALL cars including those that are more than 14 years old.
Because 104 million cars have an average age of 14 years and 5 million cars have an age of 1 year. That shows 119 million cars have an average age of 12.4 years.
First, there are at least 280M cars registered in the US.
MarkR got the formula correctā¦but youād need to go beyond 14 yearsā¦there are millions of cars older than 20 years
(I tried to use chatGPT to get the number of cars of each model year still on the roadā¦a very nice table but it summed up to 400 or 500M cars so I donāt think it synchronized a recent date for when it picked the values for the table)
Google AI says that 23% of the cars are over 20 years oldā¦but that seems a bit high
Mike
Well, I hope not also. But if it should happen to one, we would survive quite easily with one car as it is seldom that both are out of the garage. And that is when we would start to look at a newer vehicle. And to bring it back on topic, we would most likely consider an electric, particularly since much of our driving is within an hour of home. Coming up with the funds is not really anything we worry about at this point in our lives. We just like to drive our cars for a long time and havenāt had good reason to change.
Until last December I had one of them, and another that was close. I just traded in my 1994 Infiniti J30T on the Ionic 6 I bought last year. So: 29 years old, running fine, it was just time. We also had a 2005 Toyota Van, my HomeDepotMobile, I called it. Also traded that in for a 2016 just because.
Lots of old cars out there. Really old, but still fully functional.
