The key to reducing transport emissions will be renewal of the Irish car fleet. Currently the average age of cars on Irish road is nearly 9 years, with 900,000 cars over 9 years old; we simply have not been selling enough new cars over the last decade to materially reduce the average age.

Our current national car fleet (end of March 2020) 2,187,365 of which:

• 72.5% are Euro 5 (pre-2016) or older, totalling 1,586,893 cars
• 46.4% are Euro 4 or older (pre-2012), totalling 1,104,396 cars
• Only 27.5% of cars on Irish roads are Euro-6, which not only have lower CO2 output, but also much lower NOx emissions. 
  
  The most effective way to address this issue is to reduce the number of older cars in the national fleet, which means we need to replace these cars with new cars.

The composition of the new car market is changing. 

Diesel and petrol share have moved closer together, both still have an important role to play with diesel in particular being the fuel of choice for rural Ireland.

• With 2.7 million vehicles currently in the national fleet, there will continue to be a large number of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles in the Irish Fleet, even beyond the next 10 years, all of which will require servicing for many years to come. 
  
• For many motorists it will take time to transition from internal combustion engines as the cost to change even with incentives is not a viable proposition.