Data & Research · August 2026
Modern classics: the parts problem nobody can fix
New emissions proposals would require a car's original emissions parts to keep working as built. For modern classics, our collection data shows those parts have almost nowhere left to come from.
Published by Remove My Car · Based on 39,961 vehicles collected 1 August 2025 – 31 July 2026
739different models collected
185models we saw exactly once
89cars registered before 1995, from 39,961
6 Septconsultation closes
The Department for Transport is consulting on new rules for in-use vehicle emissions. The proposals would require a vehicle's emissions control system to keep operating as it did when it was approved and would treat the removal or alteration of components such as catalytic converters, lambda sensors, EGR valves and particulate filters as unlawful.
The target is deliberate tampering, and that is a fair target. Nobody in vehicle recycling wants to defend someone paying to have a filter cut out of a van.
But there is a group of vehicles for which this creates a problem with no obvious solution, and we are in an unusual position to say how big that problem is.
Britain's cars have never been older
The backdrop matters. Cars aged 13 years or over now make up a quarter of the entire UK fleet - 8.7 million vehicles, the highest ever recorded and four times the number two decades ago, according to the Department for Transport's own licensing statistics. The average car on the road is 9.7 years old, up from 6.7 in the mid-2000s.
Our collection data shows where that ageing fleet ends up: the average car reaching the end of its life is 18 years old, and eight in ten die between 14 and 22. So the vehicles these proposals would newly capture are not a niche, they are a quarter of the cars on the road, moving steadily toward the age at which parts availability decides whether they survive.
The cars caught in the middle
Cars from the 1990s and 2000s are now entering classic ownership. They were built with the first generation of complex emissions equipment - catalytic converters, lambda sensors, EGR systems, early engine management and manufacturers stopped producing replacement parts for most of them years ago.
When a manufacturer stops making a part, there is normally one place left to get a genuine one: another car of the same model, coming through a licensed treatment facility.
For an ordinary car that works well. We collected 2,399 Ford Focus and 2,090 Vauxhall Astra in twelve months, so there is a real flow of genuine components.
For a modern classic, it does not work at all.
What we actually saw in a year
Across 39,961 vehicles we collected 739 different models and the spread between them is extreme.
Models by number collected across the UK, 12 months to July 2026
| Collections in the year | Number of models | Share of all cars |
|---|
| 500 or more | 15 | 41% |
| 200 or more | 47 | 65% |
| 50 or more | 131 | 86% |
| Fewer than 10 | 426 | 3% |
| Exactly one | 185 | — |
Fifteen models account for 41% of every car we collect. At the other end, 426 models - well over half of everything we saw produced fewer than ten vehicles each across the whole country in a year, and 185 appeared exactly once.
The enthusiast cars of the 1990s and 2000s sit firmly in that tail. For many of them, a national network handling forty thousand cars a year sees a handful of donor vehicles in twelve months, sometimes one, sometimes none. Vehicles registered before 1995 came to 89 in total, two in every thousand.
That is the reclaimed parts supply. For a mass-market hatchback it is deep. For a modern classic it is barely a trickle.
Why so few of these cars are broken for parts
Three things compound, and they all point the same way:
- They are kept, not scrapped. The thing that makes a car a modern classic is that people look after it. Very few reach the end of the road at all.
- When one does arrive, hardly anyone dismantles it. Demand for the individual parts is too low to justify the labour of removing them and the shelf space to hold them. A component that might sell in two years is not worth pulling off today.
- Rising values push the other way. As these cars appreciate, a yard is far more likely to sell a complete vehicle on than to break it, taking even the occasional donor out of the parts supply.
We work with hundreds of licensed treatment facilities and see around forty thousand cars a year, so if a part is out there we usually know about it. Modern classics are the exception. They rarely reach us in the first place, and when one does, hardly anyone breaks it. So when people say the parts aren't there for these cars, they're right and we're the ones who'd know.[SPOKESPERSON NAME], Remove My Car
The rule could shrink the supply further
There is a second effect worth understanding, because it works against what the proposals are trying to achieve.
A reclaimed catalytic converter has two possible destinations. It can be removed carefully, stored and sold as a replacement part, or it can be sent for materials recovery - it contains platinum, palladium and rhodium, and there is an established market for it on that basis alone.
Recovering it as a part takes labour, storage and the confidence that it can lawfully be fitted to another car. Recovering it for its metal takes none of that and pays immediately.
If the rules leave any doubt about whether a reclaimed component may lawfully be used, the commercial logic across the sector shifts towards materials recovery. And that is one-way. A converter that has been processed for its metals is gone for good, whatever the rules or the market later decide.
What would actually help
For ordinary cars, the fix already exists in the Government's own drafting. Its guidance on historic vehicles says a replacement component need not be the original part and it must have the same technical characteristics. Applying that same test to emissions components would recognise a supply chain that is already regulated, without weakening anything on deliberate tampering.
For modern classics, that will not be enough, because the supply is not there to recognise. That is why the exemption the classic vehicle sector is asking for, where a compliant repair is not reasonably obtainable matters. Our figures suggest the scarcity behind that request is real and measurable, not theoretical.
Have your say
The consultation, Regulating environmental impact of in-use emissions of road vehicles, is open to anyone until 11:59pm on 6 September 2026 and can be found on gov.uk. Owners, clubs, specialists and businesses can all respond.
We are submitting these figures to the Department for Transport, and we would encourage others in vehicle recycling to respond as well.
About these figures
Based on 39,961 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. Model names have been standardised to combine spelling variants. Age is calculated from year of first registration. Figures describe vehicles collected by us, not national scrappage totals.
Journalists are welcome to use these figures with attribution. The full model-level dataset is available on request, and we can usually provide regional or model-level breakdowns at short notice.
