There’s now a file 42.55M autos on our roads – here is the breakdown of vehicles, vans, vans and buses

It’s official: Britain now has more vehicles on its roads than ever before.

Explaining why drivers are experiencing more jams than ever, the vehicle parc grew by 1.4 per cent in 2025 to a staggering 42,549,649 motors.

Cars still dominate the roads, with 36.7 million in total making up more than eight in ten (82.2 per cent) of all vehicles registered in Britain as numbers also increased by 1.4 per cent last year.

The rise is driven by a combination of a recovering new car market – which breached 2 million registrations for the first time since the pandemic in 2025 – but also the fact that drivers are typically keeping their motors for longer due to the high cost of living.

Almost half of the cars on our roads are older than a decade – a record high of 45.7 per cent – which is offsetting the carbon impact of more drivers transitioning to EVs.

The average car on the country’s roads has risen to nine years and eight months – the oldest since records began, the figures show.

This is up from nine years and six months in 2024. It’s also far older than the 7 years and 5-month average recorded a decade earlier in 2015. And back in 2003, the average age was just six year and a month.

Five car models make up almost one in seven (13.7 per cent) of all cars on the road.

Ford’s Fiesta is still the most common at 1.4 million examples. The Ford supermini represents 3.7 per cent of the total car parc, despite the fact the US company axed production in summer 2023.

The other four models dominating are roads are the Vauxhall Corsa, Volkswagen Golf, Ford Focus and Nissan Qashqai.

Superminis remain the top car segment choice, with 11.9 million, though SUVs are starting to close the gap with 6.7 million examples in use.

German-built cars are most dominant, representing three in ten motors, though British-made models are the next most popular, accounting for one in seven cars.

With the recent growth in sales of Chinese-assembled cars. these now account for 2.2 per cent of the car parc.

Records show that more than half of all cars in Britain are in just three colours; black, grey and blue together account for 55.5 per cent, with black the most popular and representative. For every five cars in Britain, one is black.

In contrast, pink is the rarest paint could, with just 24,594 cars registered (0.1 per cent).

Van and truck volumes also grew to record levels last year, again rising by 1.4 per cent to 5,175,598 and 626,566 units respectively. 

The UK’s bus and coach fleet, meanwhile, rose for the first time since 2021, by 0.2 per cent to 71,300 units due to the push to bolster public transport.

Last year also saw the new bus market reach the highest level since 2008, with 2,523 zero emission buses entering service, indicating significant fleet renewal.

In fact, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) analysis suggests that one in ten (10.9 per cent) of vehicles on our road are now electrified, with around one in 22 (4.5 per cent) completely zero emission.

For just passenger cars, there is now 1.8 million being driven in Britain as the transition away from the combustion engine gathers pace.

This shift to cleaner technologies is also delivering environmental benefits, with average car CO2 emissions down by 2.9 per cent on the previous year.

However, a move to EVs is also increasingly wiping out the number of vehicles with manual gearboxes.

The volume of automatic cars on the road rose by 50.5 per cent in 2025 to 10.5 million – around half the number of manual (21.2 million, up 39.8 per cent last year). 

Mike Hawes, SMMT chief executive, said: ‘Britain’s vehicle parc is growing with record numbers of newer zero emission vehicles on our roads driving environmental, economic and safety benefits. 

‘This is grounds for celebration but the pace has to quicken if ambition is to match demand with the average age of vehicles on our roads actually rising.’