On the face of it, the 23:57 claim flies in the face of January’s news that UK car sales hit a record high in 2016. The SMMT thought “very strong” consumer confidence was responsible, along with low-interest finance deals and “the launch of several new models”, although which year in the past 20 did not see several new models?
The low interest rates cannot be the answer in themselves because there is nothing specific to car ownership about interest rates. I could also get a good deal on a grand piano, but is anyone claiming that 2016 was a record year for piano ownership?
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Perhaps confidence is the answer, but 2016 was a year of uncertainty for much of the time.
What they did not talk about was who is doing the purchasing. There is growing evidence that the next generation of drivers are delaying their entry to private car ownership. The days of hopping into a brand new 1,500cc Ford Anglia bought with the proceeds from your Saturday job are gone, as are the days when you could park it in cities.
Mind you, we have to read this in the context of a global recession from which brokers have only just recovered – the 2016 NACFB’s annual survey results, when adjusted for inflation, show we are still writing less total business than nine years ago.
But whatever the cause – disillusionment with new parking regulations, financial tolls, ecological concerns, traffic restrictions, lack of funds or the ubiquity of cheap simple transport alternatives – the result is a rise in the average age of the private car owner.
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By GlobalDataAnd at the other end, people are quitting driving at an older age, because they are living longer and most of the extra years are usually active. If what persuaded your grandfather to hand in his licence was the fear of parallel-parking the Chevette, imagine giving him the keys to a car that not only has featherweight power steering, but also actually parks itself?
This may even put a slight brake on new brokers coming to the market and being successful. There is a human preference for doing business with people who remind us of ourselves. Contestants on The Apprentice confidently say: “Sir Alan probably sees something of himself in me,” and while we may look for stray slippers to hurl at the screen, they are right: It does no harm at all. Perhaps the best mirroring is to be in the right age group.
If private car ownership is about to decline, it is not about to be replaced by a single alternative. For every Uber there is a Kutsuplus, the flexible-route bus system in Helsinki in which buses drove where passengers wanted along a route plotted by computers built around destinations.
There were plans to run 100 buses by the start of 2017, but city officials stopped the funding. Was Kutsuplus a hesitant step down the right path, or a doomed compromise between public transport and true autonomy?
If you plot historic survey results from NACFB members, you get a result that suggests we reached ‘peak car’ in 2014-2015, and have fallen away a little since.
Still, the Helsinki example shows that change happens slowly. My message to them all is do not even think about retiring. Peak car or no peak car, there is no shortage of business. The trouble is that public and driverless transport cannot be seen as aspirational – unless, of course, you are the company owner that stands to reap the benefits of efficiency gains.
