Data & Research · August 2026

Britain's cars are the oldest they have ever been

A quarter of the cars on UK roads are now 13 years old or more - 8.7 million vehicles, almost four times the number two decades ago. Here is what that looks like from the end of the road.

Published by Remove My Car · DfT licensing statistics to end 2025; collection data 1 August 2025 – 31 July 2026

The Department for Transport's licensing statistics record the age of every car on Britain's roads, and the latest figures show something without precedent: 8.67 million licensed cars in the UK are now 13 years old or more - 25% of the entire fleet of 34.5 million.

Both are the highest in the department's records, which begin in 1994. The average car on the road is now 9.7 years old, up from 6.7 in the mid-2000s and the SMMT's separate Motorparc data reaches the same figure, with a record 45.7% of cars now more than a decade old.

How fast the fleet has aged

Licensed cars aged 13 years and over, Great Britain, end of year (DfT table VEH1107)

The number of older cars has almost quadrupled since 2006 and is still rising. The 13-plus stock grew by around 5% in the last year alone.

Where the ageing fleet ends up

We collect vehicles at the end of their life across the UK - 40,031 of them in the twelve months to July 2026 so we see what happens when those older cars finally stop.

The average car we collect is 18 years old, and eight in ten reach the end of the road between 14 and 22. The single most common year of first registration among the cars we collected was 2007, followed by 2008 and 2009 the cars bought in the sales boom just before the financial crisis, now leaving the road together.

Put the two datasets side by side and the picture is clear: 8.7 million cars are inside or approaching the age band in which cars end their lives, and the number entering that band grows every year.

People are keeping cars far longer than they did twenty years ago, and the numbers show it - a quarter of everything on the road is now over 13 years old. What we see at our end is where that finishes: the typical car is 18 when it reaches us, and most arrive between 14 and 22. Britain's driveways have never held this many cars in the last stretch of their life.[SPOKESPERSON NAME], Remove My Car

Why cars are living longer

The DfT data records the change without explaining it, but the shift is consistent with what we see at collection: cars built from the 2000s onward resist corrosion better and fail later than the generations before them, and owners facing higher prices for newer cars hold on to what they have. The result is the same either way, the fleet ages, and the population of cars in their final years keeps growing.

What it means if yours is one of them

A car at or past 13 is not finished according to our figures, half of everything we collect is 18 or older, so the typical older car has years left. The end usually comes down to a repair bill: when fixing the car costs more than the car is worth, most owners stop.

At that point it is worth knowing what the vehicle would bring. Values at end of life range widely by type and by area - and for a car worth nothing, a free manufacturer take-back scheme exists that most drivers have never heard of.

About these figures

Fleet figures are from the Department for Transport's vehicle licensing statistics, United Kingdom and Great Britain series to end 2025. Average-age corroboration from the SMMT's Motorparc dataset for 2025. Collection figures are from 40,031 vehicles collected by Remove My Car across the UK between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2026 through a national network of licensed Authorised Treatment Facilities. Age is calculated from year of first registration.

Journalists are welcome to use these figures with attribution. We can usually provide regional or model-level breakdowns at short notice - contact Joe Kendrick on [email protected] or 0330 159 1588.