A couple of days ago I mentioned that auto sales over the past year were the same as their pre-pandemic average. A surprising number of people saw that and wanted to know what per capita sales looked like. As it happens, I had already done that but decided not to use the chart. Here it is:
There's been a steady decline over the past couple of decades. This obviously has nothing to do with the transition to touchscreens and electric vehicles, which is why I stuck with raw vehicle sales in my previous post.
Why the decline? I don't know, but if I had to guess it has something to do with (a) the increasing reliability of cars and (b) the shrinking number of teenagers who drive.
POSTSCRIPT: On another note, this chart shows car sales per adult. This is harder to figure out than you'd think. One of my long-time pet peeves is that the Census Bureau doesn't provide simple time series for various population metrics, like number of children, number of elderly, number of adults, etc. You can extract all this stuff, but not easily.
You might be amused to know that the simplest way of counting adults is to use two FRED series. They have one series for the population of veterans over 18 and another for nonveterans over 18. Add them up and you get all adults. This is sort of a ridiculous hack, and it only goes back to 2000, but it works.
I agree that the increased reliability of modern cars is a big factor. The decrease of teenage drviers may be a factor but I wonder how real that is. I assume there wasa decrease during COVID but isit really long term and sustained?
Based on what I see among my own nieces and nephews, teenagers really are driving less. They are in no hurry to get a driver's license, and aren't at all excited about their first car. It's one of the things that lets me know the younger generation is very, very different from mine.
As a boomer I have to ask: if today's teenagers don't drive, where do they go to have sex?
Online.
"(a) the increasing reliability of cars and (b) the shrinking number of teenagers who drive."
Both true. And I might add (c) the growing number of elderly who no longer drive.
I have a few ideas:
1) Cars last longer than they used to
2) Lots of companies buy new vehicles, use them for a couple years, then sell them on the used vehicle market in still-good condition
3) It's become fashionable for yuppies to live in cities where they don't need a car
4) Young people are getting their drivers' licenses later
5) Less lead poisoning means fewer reckless drivers totaling their vehicles
6) I'd like to see a chart with used vehicle sales per capita to complement this - are new car sales being replaced with used car sales or are all car sales down on a per capita basis?
The census Bureau is part of the Deep State!!!
A question about interpreting the graph-- does the vertical scale mean about 6% of a car per adult currently? So I could multiply by a thousand and that would be 60 cars per thousand adults? It's just that thinking of cars in whole units is easier for me to visualize than percents of cars is.
If that's the case, the decline is like 25% of units over 20 years, from roughly 80 per thousand (discounting a few peaks closer to 10) before the 2008 crash down to roughly 60 per thousand lately. That's really substantial and if it's your industry, a worrisome trend even if offset by growing population.
As to why, wouldn't rising cost be a factor too? I think figures are available for that and wouldn't be surprised if average new-vehicle cost has been rising over that time. Even corrected for inflation.
I think it's easier to look at it as 6% of a car per adult per year, so the current rate is 1 new car purchase per 16.7 adult-years, down from 1 car per 12.5 adult-years (for 8%). You can compare that with average miles driven per year (10-15,000), and car lifespan in miles (getting closer to 200,000 for many modern models), plus cost and the other factors people have commented on.
Thanks. It wasn't obvious to me what unit the percent referred to, hence the question. I see where your measures are coming from and kind of like the "new-car purchases per x adults per year" expression because it's about entire vehicles rather than slivers of them (but would probably stick with cars/thousand adults even when they're equivalent-- no accounting for taste, I guess). The drop in new-vehicle sales per adult over the 20 years is significant no matter how it's expressed.
too lazy to check, but is this "cars" as in sedans or also SUVs and pickups. Assuming the latter, perhaps considering the decreasing popularity of sedans, the transition involved a few people going from sedan as the family car to sedan plus SUV/pickup to SUV/pickup only?
My first, uneducated and uninformed thought was the increasing number of foreign-made cars on the road. In my (limited) experience, they have tended to last a lot longer than American made, and require fewer repairs.
The brilliant 1950s brainwave ot "planned obsolescence" and the advertising meme that you need to get the latest model every year (so quality and reliability were just unnecessary expenses) set back the American auto industry by several decades.