The key to reducing transport emissions will be renewal of the Irish car fleet. Currently the average age of cars on Irish road is 9.9 years, we simply have not been selling enough new cars over the last decade to materially reduce the average age.
Our current national car fleet has 2.47 million cars on the road.
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. A minimum of 140,000 new registrations is needed each year to adequately renew the national fleet and maintain a healthy supply of used vehicles.
The composition of the new car market is changing.
Overall, the average age of the national car fleet is now 9.9 years old.
This compares to 5.8 years at the start of 2008.