Almost a third of cars in the Netherlands are 15 years or older – How old is your car?

We have not yet finished reviewing the Dutch vehicle fleet. We recently looked at the distribution of the Dutch vehicle fleet according to the type of drivetrain, wrote about the number of passenger cars that were added in one year and also mapped out which brands have the most cars in our country. We also highlighted what percentage of cars in the Netherlands have which type of transmission. Now we look at the years of construction of the cars in the Netherlands. What seems? The Dutch vehicle fleet is aging relatively quickly.

On January 1 this year, the Dutch passenger car fleet consisted of 9,233,107 cars. Of those, 24.1 percent – less than a quarter – were five years old or younger. In 2022, 25.2 percent of the Dutch vehicle fleet was five years old or younger. On January 1, 2018 – five years earlier – 25.7 percent of cars in the Netherlands were a maximum of 5 years old. We do not observe any major differences here, although we can conclude that the percentage of cars in the Netherlands that are 5 years old or younger has decreased by 1.1 percentage points between 2022 and 2023.

It becomes more interesting when we take a closer look at the older years of construction. For example, on January 1, 2018, 26.4 percent of the Dutch vehicle fleet was 15 years or older. Five years later – on January 1, 2023 – 30 percent of all passenger cars in the Netherlands were 15 years or older. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of passenger cars aged 15 years or older in our country increased by 3.6 percentage points. 12 percent of the Dutch vehicle fleet was even 20 years or older on January 1, 2023. In 2018, just under 8 percent of the fleet consisted of cars aged 20 years or older. At the beginning of this year, 55.6 percent of the cars – the lion’s share – were 10 years or older. In 2018, this percentage was still 51.4 percent. In 2021, the Dutch vehicle fleet was on average older than that of any other Western European country.