The Average Car on US Roads Is Now Nearly 13 Years Old, an All-Time High, per Charlie Bilello
A record that keeps breaking
The average car on the road in America is now nearly 13 years old, an all-time high, per Charlie Bilello.
Thirty years ago, the average was 8.4 years. That means the typical vehicle on US roads today is more than 50 percent older than its mid-1990s counterpart, and the fleet keeps aging.
S&P Global Mobility put the average age of US light vehicles at 12.8 years in 2025, the second straight year the figure rose by two months, in a run of eight consecutive annual increases. Passenger cars averaged 14.5 years old, against 11.9 years for light trucks, across a fleet of roughly 289 million vehicles in operation.
How the fleet got this old
The pandemic years poured fuel on a slow trend. Supply chain disruptions and semiconductor shortages choked new vehicle production, forcing millions of drivers to postpone purchases they would normally have made.
Registrations bounced back to more than 16 million in 2024, the first time since 2019, but that was not enough to offset the growing stock of aging vehicles. A scrappage rate of about 4.5 percent means older cars leave the fleet slowly, so every weak sales year pushes the average age higher.
Priced out of new
The economics are not subtle. The average new vehicle transaction price topped $50,000 for the first time in September 2025, at $50,080, according to Kelley Blue Book figures, and the average APR on financed new vehicles was 6.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025, per Edmunds.
Keeping the old car is not free either. The cost of motor vehicle maintenance and repair was up 5.2 percent year over year in August, per Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and S&P Global Mobility expects vehicles 6 to 14 years old to grow to about 40 percent of the fleet through 2028.
What makes the trend durable is that modern cars can take it. Better engineering and corrosion protection mean 100,000 miles is now a milestone rather than a warning, so a paid-off vehicle with a few repair bills a year beats a new six-year loan for many households.
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Options market and stocks to watch
An aging fleet is a structural tailwind for the auto parts retailers, which sell into every extra year a car stays on the road. AZO posted $20.3 billion in fiscal 2026 sales, up 7.4 percent, and ORLY is the other big name Bilello has flagged alongside it for years as a beneficiary of the trend.
The flip side is replacement demand. Slower turnover weighs on volume growth at F and GM, while used vehicle platforms like CVNA benefit when buyers trade down instead of buying new. Watch options flow in AZO and ORLY around earnings for signs the repair economy is still compounding, and follow auto names on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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