America’s Car Buyers Are Getting Older and Driving Longer
Their vehicles are also staying on the road a lot longer. That doesn’t bode well for the auto market.
Not everyone’s looking.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
In October, seasonally adjusted U.S. auto sales topped 16.5 million, making the U.S., unsurprisingly, the second-biggest auto market in the world after China. Big as that figure is, it’s down by more than 2 million vehicles from two years ago and back to levels seen in 2014, 2007 and 2002.
There’s a major difference between the auto market of the late 2000s and the late 2010s, however: the age of buyers. Auto market researcher Michael Sivak recently noted the distinct shift in new-car purchasers toward older buyers. In 2007, nearly half of all light-duty vehicle buyers in the U.S. were under the age of 44; in 2017, more than half were over the age of 55.