Average Age of Cars and Trucks on the Road Jumps to Record

There's a potential wrinkle to these stats in the US. The "cash for clunkers" program, obstinately a boon for fuel efficiency, or a giveaway to auto manufacturers, depending on how you look at it, took a massive number of used cars off the road.

Higher reliability and the pandemic definitely have something to do with it. But so does the long slow recovery of the used car market after something like a million perfectly good cars were destroyed.

Less new vehicles are being purchased because there's ample supply of serviceable post-clunkers used ones