I suspect failing reliability and accident damage are other reasons for early scrapping of vehicles - they are becoming very expensive to repair so write offs are more common.

I witnessed an accident a couple of weeks ago - 17 reg FIesta had hit a lamppost at quite low speed - driver was out and walking. Nothing too major in the grand scheme of things, compared to the cost of the car. Suspension and bodywork damage - bonnet and wing. We managed to start the car to move it.

However both front airbags and a side airbag had gone off so the car was probably heading for the scrapyard.

Edited by daveyjp on 05/10/2018 at 13:44

The average age of cars in the UK is a mere 8yrs.

Is it? I normally buy cars at that age and run them to 12-15 years old, as do many others.

I'm actually thinking of going for an old S reg (1998) Peugeot 306 for my next car. One owner from new, great condition, and just sailed through another MOT. Price? £400.

Gibbo, I don't suppose you own enough cars to affect the national average by much, so I guess 8 years is about right. Plenty of people keep the market topped up with new and nearly-new ones, over 2 million a year (good choice, by the way :-) )

The daft thing about scrappage is that for over 30 years the industry has made huge progress in making their products last longer, while still expecting the public to keep passing their parcels down the pecking order. If things look like slowing down, pressure is put on the govt. to shove things along a bit.

Personally I am in favour of an annual MoT, because car breakdowns are now rare, so that plenty of drivers expect them to keep going without maintenance. Most of us on here aren't like that, but we should allow for those that are.

As in the thread about 20% drop in sales...

Keep the motor industry happy... big employers... £tens of millions to Aston Martin for a factory in wales.. same to JLR for the engine factory in Wolverhampton. (other examples out there)

Make it so hard to repair cars that the average joe punter can't fix them anymore.

More work for garages, more VAT for HMG...be it on sales, servicing or repairs.

Consider the cost of VAT on the car, excise duty, fuel taxes, insurance premium tax, vat on servicing, repairs, vat on parking... and ll the other bits of tax on the motor industry. social security contributions on workers, their taxes, their employers share of those taxes too.

Motoring is a nice little earner for HMG, but i do wish that someone somewhere had got sensible and upped the showroom tax and zeroed the ongoing excise duty with an additional rate of duty on fuel so that the granny who does her 2000 miles a year pays for that, and the rep who does 30000 miles pays that too. No VED evasion then...

Edited by oldroverboy. on 05/10/2018 at 14:30

If the average age is 8 years, then for every new car, there is a 16 year old wreck on the road. With regard to the US, life expectancy will be influenced by corrosion. If a car is not safe or polutes excessively, it should not be on the road. If it costs too much to fix, then scrap it.

We have to have an MoT - it insures that on 1 day/year the car is roadworthy. Left with no MoT for 2 years (suggestion of 2 year MoTs in the recent past) you need some to look underneath to check of the brakes, steering, corrosion. Even new /newish cars can go 2 years & 20K miles without the service light showing - a lot can go wrong with a car in 20K miles.

I think there is a happy medium between the old MoT & the new one - a car needs to be roadworthy (& not putting out masses of diesel fumes) HOWEVER more pollution can be caused by building new cars to replace what are essentially safe cars but they do not meet "paper standards" set by the EU/Government.

If the idea is to make the roads safer then they should test the drivers every year.

Good suggestion, but unlikely to be greeted with enthusiasm ....

If the idea is to make the roads safer then they should test the drivers every year.

29 million MOT's carried out every year. Mine takes about 20 minutes. Garages do the work just like they have always done.

45.5 million licence holders in 2014 (some will be provisional). An annual assessment including all road types and a class room session would take well over an hour. A complete new set up would be required to carry out these assessments. Using simple maths assuming one person could carry out 8 assessments a day (unlikely) and works 45 weeks a year after leave they would need over 25000 qualified staff, plus admin staff plus premises. How much would that little lot cost.

Actually it would not cost HMG anything, we, the drivers would have to pay.

I am for sure not following this tend:

Daily driver: 1997 Ford Mondeo 1.8 petrol 246k miles, should last another 2 years before it will be replaced with an 8-10 year old vehicle.

Other half: 2006 Ford Fiesta 1.6 auto (torque converter) 35k miles, still drives like a new car.

Whilst the neighbours have a Tesla Model S, £60k plus high end Benz and Audi's not to mention the obligigatory BMW of course. The money saved by running old cars for many years has helped pay off the house and be mortgage free purchase a second property again mortgage free and send the children to private school. They will leave uni with no debt at all when that time comes.

Rather than giving a motor manufactuer huge profits would rather do more sensible and far more productive things with the money rather than making others rich.

Edited by carl233 on 06/10/2018 at 15:16

<< Do you really mean that 50% of UK cars on the road today are over 8 years old? This doesn't correlate with my observation looking outside at a busy urban road.

I'm guessing that you may have meant that the average age at which vehicles are scrapped in the UK is 8yr, which would certainly leave a more realistic ratio of older vehicles on the highways ... but of course an average still implies that 50% fall on the either side of your mean figure, or 50% are scrapped at or below 8yr (!), whilst the other 50% last longer. >>

As all you statisticians will know, there are three kinds of average: mean, median and mode. I think John's figure will be the mean, calculated by adding up the ages of every car and dividing by the number of cars. It seems you are thinking of the median, which is the age which has exactly half the total number of cars either side (younger or older). It's not the same thing! Nor is the mode, which is the most 'popular' age, the age showing the greatest number of cars - which will probably reflect a peak in annual sales, at least for younger cars.

And I think most cars which do not get written off in accidents last more than 8 years before being scrapped - unless there is a scrappage scheme, of course ....

Car ownership is an emotional decision for many. Hence the attraction of new cars with unnecessary trinkets rather than fundamentally reliable, adequately fast, cost effective etc.

Cars are scrapped when they become uneconomic to repair partly due to complexity and government regulation.

In my view cars are hugely over-regulated beyond the need for the safety of occupants and others. Were the same disciplines applied to other parts of life we would have large fines issued for a failure to have the requisite 8 inches of loft insulation and other environmental housing standards, monitoring of household recycling rates, all supported a team of government appointed and trained inspectors funded by annual inspection fees charged to each household.

Nearly forgot about rust!.....

.......A friend had a bigger Fiat (can't remember the name) that was new in 1981 and didn't make it's 6th year.

What was the average car age then?

The only UK figures I can find only go back to 2000 - 7.1 years, not much less than now. Which is surprising as in those days there were still a lot of rapidly rusting 20th century cars around - even Mercedes! After nearly 20 yrs the longevity of cars should have improved more than this.