Cars in use and cars scrapped

The passenger-car fleet of Lithuania, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Romania, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Portugal, Greece and Slovenia: size, electric share, age, end-of-life vehicles and exits

Registrations are a flow: the cars that enter a country's register in a month. This page is about the stock, the cars that are on the register at the end of a year, and about the way out of it. It sets official annual series, mostly from the EU statistics, beside the registration data of this site: how many cars each country has for its population, how much of the fleet is electric compared with what is being registered now, how old the cars are, how many are officially scrapped, and how many leave the register in a year, which is not the same thing.

Cars in use

Passenger cars on the register at the end of the year, and the same figure per 1,000 inhabitants, the usual measure of how motorised a country is. The change over five years is left empty where the series has a break inside those years.

Italy has the most cars for its population, 709 per 1,000 inhabitants, and Latvia the fewest, 435. Over five years the fleet grew fastest in Romania (+20.6%) and slowest in Estonia (+0.1%).

The fleet's electric share

A car stays on the road for fifteen to twenty years, so the fleet follows the showroom with a long delay. The first two columns are shares of all cars in use; the third is the battery-electric share of this site's registrations over the market's last twelve months, and the last column divides the one by the other. The plug-in column is empty where the source does not yet separate plug-in hybrids in the stock.

Denmark has the most electric fleet, 17.9% of its cars, and Poland the least, 0.4%. The distance between what is bought and what is on the road is widest in Denmark: 78.3% of the registrations of the last twelve months were battery-electric, against 17.9% of the cars in use.

Age of the fleet

The share of cars in use that are more than ten and more than twenty years old. Markets that import most of their cars used start a car's local life at ten years, and it shows here. Some countries do not report the oldest band separately, and a few do not report age at all.

Romania has the oldest fleet, with 80.3% of its cars over ten years old, and Luxembourg the youngest, with 28.9%.

End-of-life vehicles

The official count of scrapping: vehicles handed to an authorised treatment facility and reported under the EU's end-of-life vehicles directive. The table shows the latest year reported, which is about three years behind, per 1,000 cars in use at the end of the year before and per 100 new cars registered in the same year.

Ireland reported the most end-of-life vehicles for the size of its fleet, 38.7 per 1,000 cars in use (2023), and Luxembourg the fewest, 2.7 (2023).

Exits from the fleet

If the fleet at the end of last year, plus every car that entered the register this year, is larger than the fleet at the end of this year, the difference has left the register. That is what the table calls exits: cars in use at the end of the year before, plus the year's new registrations, plus the year's used imports, minus cars in use at the end of the year. For a market whose source counts used imports, a year is shown only when this site has all twelve months of them; for the others the imports are unknown and are not added, as the table says.

In the latest year with a figure, exits were highest in Luxembourg, 13.7% of the cars in use a year earlier, and lowest in Greece, 1.1%. Poland and Slovenia have a break in the series of cars in use within these years, and no exits are computed across it.

Where a register publishes the exits: Czechia

The identity above is a residual. A register that counts the cars it removes gives the same quantity directly, and splits it: cars exported, of every age, the nearly new ones that are registered and soon sold abroad among them, and cars cancelled, whose roadworthiness was cancelled and which are destined for physical disposal. The table sets that count beside the identity of the same year, which here adds the year's used imports from the same source, and beside the official end-of-life vehicles for the years that have a figure.

In 2025, 242 703 passenger cars left the register of Czechia: 75 013 were exported, 30.9% of them, and 167 690 were cancelled. In 2022 exports were 22.8% of the cars leaving. For every 100 new cars registered in 2025, 30 cars were exported. The identity gives 240 614 exits for 2025, 0.9% below the register's own count; the two were furthest apart in 2022, when the identity was 39.6% below it. Cancelled cars are the closest national figure to scrapping: 140 201 in 2023, 151 325 with light vans, against 156 593 end-of-life vehicles in the official count of the same year, which count cars and light vans together.