Automotive Statistics 2026: Ownership Costs, Loans, and EVs
The average car on American roads is now 12.8 years old, the oldest the country’s fleet has ever been, according to S&P Global Mobility. That single number explains more about the current auto market than any sales chart does.
People aren’t holding onto old cars because they love them. They’re holding on because a new one costs more than most households can comfortably justify right now, and this piece breaks down exactly where that money actually goes, alongside the market numbers that get all the headlines instead.
- Owning a new car costs $11,577 a year on average, or $964.78 a month, according to AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study, actually down $719 from the year before as buyers shifted toward cheaper models.
- Depreciation alone eats 37.4% of that annual cost, more than fuel, insurance, and maintenance combined, the single biggest reason a new car is usually the most expensive way to get from A to B.
- The average US vehicle just hit a record 12.8 years old, up from 12.2 years in 2022, a 4th straight year of increases as people delay replacing what they already own.
- Used vehicles outsold new ones by more than 2 to 1 in 2025, roughly 38.6 million used sales versus 16.3 million new, even as used prices sit well above pre pandemic levels.
- Electric vehicles crossed 25% of new car sales globally in 2025, per the International Energy Agency, though the US and Europe are moving at very different speeds inside that trend.
AAA, S&P Global Mobility, and IBISWorld. Checked September 2026.
What Owning a New Car Actually Costs
AAA has tracked the real cost of car ownership annually for decades, and its 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts the total at $11,577 a year for a new vehicle driven 15,000 miles, covering depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, financing, and taxes together.
AAA 2025 Your Driving Costs study, based on a new vehicle driven 15,000 miles annually over 5 years of ownership.
Depreciation dominates the total more than any other single factor, and it’s the one cost a buyer has almost no control over once the purchase is made. Fuel, insurance, and maintenance combined still don’t quite match what depreciation alone takes.
The full total actually dropped $719 from 2024, AAA’s first meaningful decline in years, driven by lower finance charges, cheaper fuel, and buyers shifting toward more affordable trims and models rather than any single dramatic change.
Insurance specifically has been climbing outside AAA’s model too. Insurify tracked the average full coverage premium at $2,237 in the first half of 2026, projected to reach $2,242 by year end, with 27 states already seeing increases and 32 expected to by December. Connecticut leads with a projected 15% jump for the full year, driven partly by auto repair costs that have risen 45% over the past 5 years.
Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, and Nevada round out the states seeing some of the steepest increases alongside Connecticut. None of that is evenly distributed, so the national average premium is a genuinely poor stand in for what any specific driver actually pays.
AAA’s whole model runs on 15,000 miles a year, and that assumption holds up well against real driving data. The Federal Highway Administration puts the national average closer to 13,596 to 14,263 miles a year depending on which recent survey year is used, close enough that the cost figures above apply to most actual drivers, not just a hypothetical 1.
That average hides a real gender and age gap underneath it. Men drive about 16,550 miles a year on average versus 10,142 for women, and drivers aged 20 to 54 log the most miles of any age group at roughly 15,195 annually, meaningfully above the 15,000 mile figure AAA builds its whole cost model around.
Geography swings the number even harder than gender or age. Wyoming drivers cover the most ground of any state at 21,588 miles a year, more than 3 times the 6,695 miles logged by the average driver in Washington DC, where shorter commutes and public transit both cut into yearly mileage.
Higher mileage states also tend toward higher fuel and maintenance costs in AAA’s model, since both scale with distance driven. A Wyoming driver realistically spends meaningfully more than the $11,577 national average simply by driving as much as their state typically requires.
Tires Are a Bigger Line Item Than Most Owners Expect
Tires sit inside that maintenance category above, and they’re rarely a small purchase. The median US consumer paid $212 per tire in Consumer Reports’ latest member survey, putting a full set of 4 squarely in the $600 to $1,200 range once mounting, balancing, and disposal fees are added.
Price still varies enormously by category. Economy all season sets run $400 to $700, mid range touring tires $570 to $1,100, and premium truck or SUV tires $1,100 to $1,800, before installation on any of them.
EVs and larger trucks push toward the higher end of every category, since both demand tires rated for extra weight and torque. That’s a real, ongoing cost difference between EV ownership and a comparable gas vehicle that doesn’t show up in most EV cost comparisons.
The Global Market Numbers Depend Entirely on What’s Being Measured
The global automotive market gets valued anywhere from $2.3 trillion to $2.6 trillion for 2026 depending on the research firm, and the gap comes down to definitions again. The narrower figure covers the broader automotive market as most firms define it, while the larger one specifically measures automobile and light duty motor vehicle manufacturing.
Unit sales tell a similarly split story. S&P Global Mobility expects roughly 91.8 million vehicles sold globally in 2026, essentially flat against 2025’s 91.7 million. ABI Research, using a broader count, puts the same year at more than 97 million units, a 1.6% increase.
China remains the clearest growth story inside either number. It sold 34.4 million vehicles in 2025, up 9.4% year over year and a new national record, while US new vehicle sales reached 16.3 million over the same period.
Used Cars Outsell New Ones by a Wide Margin
New car sales get most of the headlines, but they’re genuinely the smaller half of the market. Used vehicle sales reached roughly 38.6 million units in 2025, more than double the 16.3 million new vehicles sold the same year.
US used and new vehicle sales volume, 2025, compiled from Edmunds and industry sales tracking data.
That volume gap hasn’t stopped used prices from climbing uncomfortably close to new ones. A typical 3 year old used vehicle averaged a record $32,461 in the second quarter of 2026, while new vehicle prices hover closer to $49,000 on average.
Used prices did ease about 6.1% from 2025 into 2026, real relief after years of increases, though they remain well above pre pandemic norms. For most buyers, a 3 to 5 year old used vehicle still wins on total cost of ownership even with that narrowed gap, mainly because it’s already absorbed the steepest depreciation years shown in the chart above.
Financing a Car Has Gotten Genuinely Riskier
Experian’s State of the Automotive Finance Market report put the average new car loan rate at 6.35% in the second quarter of 2026, and the average used car loan rate far higher at 11.19%. Credit score swings that range enormously: excellent credit buyers averaged 4.55% on a new loan, while poor credit buyers averaged 16.01%, more than 3 times as much for financing the exact same vehicle.
Loan terms have stretched to cover the gap. The average new vehicle loan now runs 69.48 months, just shy of 6 years, and 35.55% of new vehicle loans in the first quarter of 2026 extended beyond 6 years entirely.
| Credit tier | New car rate | Used car rate |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent credit | 4.55% | 6.30% |
| Poor credit | 16.01% | 21.77% |
Experian, Q2 2026 State of the Automotive Finance Market report. Same vehicle, same lender pool, credit score is the only variable.
That gap compounds over a loan that already runs close to 6 years. A poor credit buyer financing the same $35,000 vehicle as an excellent credit buyer will pay thousands more in interest alone, on top of already facing worse loan terms and a weaker negotiating position at the dealership.
Shorter term delinquencies are climbing too, just less dramatically. 30 day delinquencies rose to 2.00% in the first quarter of 2026 from 1.95% a year earlier, and 60 day delinquencies moved from 0.83% to 0.86% over the same period.
What Actually Happens After a Safety Recall
NHTSA logged 604 vehicle safety recalls in 2026 across 163 different manufacturers. Ford Motor Company issued the most at 64, followed by Chrysler at 30 and General Motors at 22.
The scale involved is genuinely large. 39.6 million vehicles were recalled across the 4 quarters of fiscal year 2026 alone, against a total registered US fleet of roughly 283 million, meaning something like 1 in 7 vehicles on the road carried an open recall at some point this year.
Not every recall carries the same urgency. 2 of Ford’s 2026 notices were serious enough that NHTSA attached a formal do not drive warning, the agency’s strongest possible language, reserved for defects considered dangerous enough that continued use before repair poses an immediate risk.
Recall volume is also accelerating quarter over quarter, not holding steady. NHTSA processed 12.6 million recalled vehicles in one recent quarter alone, up from 9.5 million the quarter before, a jump too large to explain as normal reporting variation.
Checking a specific vehicle’s recall status directly through NHTSA using its VIN takes under a minute and costs nothing, worth doing for any older vehicle bought used, since a completion rate under 50% means plenty of used cars on lots today are carrying an unresolved safety recall from years earlier.
Dealerships handle the actual repair work for free regardless of how old the vehicle is or who currently owns it, since the manufacturer bears that cost by federal requirement, not the dealer or the driver. The only real cost involved is the time it takes to book the appointment and drop the car off.
Why the Average Car on the Road Keeps Getting Older
S&P Global Mobility has tracked average US vehicle age every year, and the trend line only moves one direction. It’s climbed every year since well before the pandemic, but the pace of increase has stayed remarkably steady even as new car prices swung wildly underneath it.
S&P Global Mobility annual vehicle age reports, 2022 through 2025.
Broken out by type, passenger cars are aging faster than the fleet average, now averaging 14.5 years, while light trucks sit younger at 11.9 years. Vehicles in operation nationally grew to 289 million, even as the scrappage rate held at a steady 4.5%.
Keeping an older car running reliably usually comes down to parts more than labor. SPELAB Auto Parts is worth checking before a shop visit if you’re comfortable handling routine replacements yourself, and our car service deals page tracks current offers for the jobs better left to a professional.
Beyond parts and service specifically, our broader automotive category covers the rest of what comes up around owning a car, dashcams and roof racks included.
Where Electric Vehicle Adoption Stands
The International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2026 puts worldwide EV sales at over 20 million in 2025, 25% of the entire new car market, up 20% from 2024. That’s the clearest, most consistently sourced EV figure available, and it’s worth anchoring to since a lot of competing numbers float around this topic.
International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2026, 2025 sales data by region.
China alone accounts for roughly 60% of every EV sold worldwide, and its own domestic market has reached a 55% EV sales share, meaning more than half of all new cars sold in China are already electric. Its growth rate has actually slowed to under 20% year over year though, down from over 75% in prior years, simply because the easy early adopters have already bought in.
The US tells a much choppier story. American EV sales sat around 10% market share through most of 2025, then fell 45% in the 4th quarter specifically following policy changes affecting EV incentives. Europe moved the opposite direction, growing 30% for the year, led by Germany’s 850,000 EV sales and 50% annual growth.
Battery electric vehicles, the fully electric kind with no gas engine at all, made up 65% of global EV sales in 2025, with plug in hybrids taking the remaining 35%. That’s a real reversal from prior years when plug in hybrids were gaining ground, suggesting buyers and manufacturers both are betting more heavily on full electrification rather than a hybrid middle ground.
Which Brands Are Selling the EVs
BYD holds the clear global lead among battery electric vehicle makers, with close to 0.6 million BEV sales in the second quarter of 2026 alone. Tesla sits second worldwide at around 12% global BEV market share, a real drop from the outright dominance it held just a few years earlier.
Inside the US specifically, Tesla’s position looks stronger, accounting for 45% of all new EV sales in the country in 2026. That’s down from 49% in 2024, a gradual erosion rather than a collapse, as more brands finally bring competitive EV models to American buyers.
The gap between Tesla’s US share and its global share comes down almost entirely to geography. BYD barely sells passenger vehicles in the US at all right now, so its global lead over Tesla doesn’t show up in American sales data the way it does everywhere else.
Charging infrastructure has finally started catching up to the vehicles themselves. The US had 82,035 public charging stations as of 2026, and public charging ports grew 34.6% year over year, actually outpacing the 26.7% growth in EVs on the road over the same period, the first time infrastructure growth has led adoption rather than trailed it.
ChargePoint dominates the network landscape with 57.5% of all US stations. California leads every state by a wide margin at nearly 20,000 stations, more than 3 times second place New York’s 5,592.
Most of that infrastructure is still Level 2 charging rather than fast charging, roughly 73% of all ports nationally. Level 2 works fine overnight at home or during a full workday parked, but it’s genuinely too slow for a road trip, which is exactly the gap DC fast charging, still under 27% of the network, is built to fill.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it actually cost to own a car per year?
$11,577 a year on average for a new vehicle, according to AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study, covering depreciation, fuel, insurance, maintenance, financing, and taxes combined. That works out to $964.78 a month.
What is the biggest cost of owning a car?
Depreciation, at 37.4% of the total annual cost according to AAA’s data. It costs more on its own than fuel, insurance, and maintenance added together, and it’s the one cost a buyer can’t reduce once the purchase is made.
How old is the average car in the US?
12.8 years as of 2025, a record high according to S&P Global Mobility, up from 12.2 years in 2022. Passenger cars specifically average 14.5 years, while light trucks average 11.9 years.
Do used cars outsell new cars?
Yes, by a wide margin. Roughly 38.6 million used vehicles sold in 2025 versus 16.3 million new ones, though a 3 year old used vehicle now averages $32,461, narrowing the gap with new vehicle pricing near $49,000.
What percentage of new cars sold are electric?
25% globally in 2025, per the International Energy Agency, up 20% from 2024. China drives most of that figure with a 55% domestic EV sales share, while the US sat closer to 10% before falling further in late 2025.
How much does a set of new tires cost?
A full set of 4 typically runs $600 to $1,200 installed for a standard passenger car, based on a median $212 per tire in Consumer Reports’ latest survey. Premium truck, SUV, or EV rated tires commonly run $1,100 to $1,800 for the set.
Every trend in this piece points the same direction. Cars cost more to own than headline sticker prices suggest, people are responding by keeping what they already have running longer, and the used market is absorbing demand the new car market can’t serve at current prices.
None of that is likely to reverse quickly. A 12.8 year average vehicle age took 4 straight years of steady increases to reach, and nothing in the cost data above suggests that pressure is easing anytime soon.
The record auto loan delinquency rate and the record vehicle age aren’t 2 separate stories either. They’re the same affordability squeeze showing up in 2 different places, one in how long people keep a car, and the other in how many are struggling to keep paying for it.
