Cast your mind back six months to the first week of January. These were the desperately dark days when a down-in-the-dumps society of motor makers and Traders (SMMT) admitted that new automobile sales in 2017 were way lower than in 2016.
Many people in the automotive industry lost out, as did HM Treasury. never forget that for every £25,000 new automobile not sold, the government loses £5,000 in VAT.
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• best-selling automobiles in the UK 2018
But a year-on-year downturn in new automobile sales, coupled with substantial quantities of old automobiles being scrapped, at least indicates fewer cars, vans and trucks on the road, and a bit a lot more space, right? Er, wrong. There have never been a lot more automobiles in front of and behind you.
Astonishingly, there are around 50 per cent a lot more in use in Britain today than in 1997. According to just-published department for carry data, at the end of 2017/start of 2018, 37.7 million were on UK roads. The SMMT claims it’s 39.7m. They’re both wrong, because the true number is easily north of 40 million after factoring in often-ignored (and illegal) unregistered/unlicensed automobiles on the road, plus legal ones on foreign plates.
When I was a kid, road automobiles in Britain collectively travelled tens of billions of miles per annum. now they every year do 300-400 billion miles on UK roads. The network feels slower and a lot more cramped than ever because, er, it is. and it’s inevitable that it’ll become even a lot more overcrowded as the current number of licence holders grows from 48m to a lot more than 50m, in line with official forecasts that the UK population will hit 70 million by the 2020s.
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