In terms of passenger cars, Suzuki continues to lead the way, and Ford managed to dominate in the category of light commercial vehicles, while the Hungarian new car market shrank in 2021.Continue reading
In four years, the average age of cars on the road in Hungary has increased by a full year, reaching 15 years, HVG reports.
The reasons include the fact that more than half of the cars registered for the first time in Hungary are second-hand vehicles, typically imported from Western Europe and a few years old. Even if they arrive in relatively better condition, they typically remain on the roads until they are destroyed.
For the three most popular car brands in Hungary (Opel, Suzuki, and Volkswagen), the average age is a good year and a half higher than for the total fleet:
It’s not unusual to come across an old GDR car or a really old Moskvitch on the road. There are even more than 300 Moskvitches of the most surprising age, with an average age of 42.4 years, and more than 9,000 Trabant cars of an average age of 34.5 years on Hungarian roads. And of the Wartburgs of a similar average age (34.7 years), 4,165 were running across the country last year.
According to HVG, the average age of the domestic car fleet was 10 years in 2007, but from 2011 it started to age again. The 2021 figure is already more than three years worse than the EU average (11.8 years), with only Romania (16.8 years) having a vehicle fleet older than the EU average.
Featured image: illustration via Pixabay