Last year, 26.7 million vehicles were on the road in Canada. Two million of them were brand new.
Vehicle ownership in Canada has been rising dramatically since the turn of the century, when 70 per cent of us owned a vehicle. As of 2017, 88 per cent of Canadians owned vehicles — and despite the interest in the future of electric vehicles, 99 per cent of our cars have internal combustion engines (ICEs.)
Those are the numbers compiled by Dennis DesRosiers, principal of DesRosiers Automotive Consultants, in a year-end review of Canada’s fleet.
“The number of vehicles on the road reached record levels in 2017,” said DesRosiers. “Canadians are embracing vehicle ownership faster than any other nation that we know of.”
We aren’t just buying the average passenger car, however. Canadians are shifting from cars to light trucks, and have been for decades. Today, 70 per cent of our vehicles are SUVs and other larger vehicles.
Perhaps ironically, the light truck movement began in concert with the hippie movement.
“It started in the Woodstock era, buying panel vans and Volkswagen buses,” said DesRosiers. “We would fill the back, carpet it, drive to the beach, fill the cooler and party.”
Until the Woodstock music festival, a cultural milestone in so many ways, light trucks consistently made up less than 18 per cent of the market. “It was 15 per cent in 1959. Then it exploded,” said DesRosiers.
And we North Americans haven’t looked back.
Things haven’t changed much
For the 16th year in a row, says DesRosiers, alternative fuel vehicles did not sell well in Canada.
“People still believe in the hype, and there’s a lot of talk, but not a lot of consumers are walking the talk,” he said.
“Electric vehicles (EVs) since 2000 have sold in the mid-20,000 range for six years. Almost all of those are hybrids, so they have an ICE. Battery electric, pure electrics, were between 7,000 and 8,000 units or 0.3 per cent (from a) market share perspective.
“Nobody has yet been able to figure out how to sell them.”
That being said, “all roads lead to EVs,” said DesRosiers. “It’s going to be a long road, and a twisty, curvy road. The view in some quarters, that the market will be dominated by EVs in the next three to five years, belies the last 18 years.
“We’re not anticipating a 10 per cent market share until the late 2020s.”
In 2017, conventional gasoline cars numbered 23.5 million, or nearly 88 per cent of the market. Diesel vehicles came in at just under 850,000, and flex fuel vehicles just over two million. Hybrids, battery electrics and other alternative fuel vehicles numbered just 275,000.
DesRosiers expects vehicle ownership to continue growing. By 2030, he believes 38 million vehicles will be driving Canadian roads, and 3.2 per cent of those, or 1.22 million, will be powered by alternate fuels.
Canadians are also still driving pretty old cars
“The core reason why vehicles on the road are growing so rapidly: we are buying two million units a year now, but scrappage is down. The survival rate of vehicles has doubled in this century. There was a time when 20 per cent of vehicles survived 15 years of ownership. Now it’s 45 per cent.”
Cars are simply made better, last longer, and can be purchased used at very low prices. Households are picking up those older cars for their kids, or to have a second or third or even fourth vehicle in the driveway. Canadian millennials, too, are buying more vehicles and that trend continues to grow.
It’s not necessarily a good thing, from a fuel efficiency or emissions reduction standpoint, said DesRosiers. Today’s cars are very efficient; yesterday’s, not so much.
“Older vehicles staying on the road didn’t have access to the fuel efficiency tech. So they’re sticking around forever and ever and ever. The best strategy for reducing emissions is to get old vehicles off the road.”
