Average age of cars on the road is 11 years vs 8 years in the 90s...which means cars are on average lasting 37.5% longer than 20 years ago. And that might be a lagging indicator.
No, the measure is average age, which is more indicative of used cars than any largess caused by various boom times. Cars don't get salvaged for spare parts and metal until they're no longer useful as vehicles. They otherwise get resold and traded in and put back out on the road.
Are you sure about how this metric is defined? The average age of cars in today's fleet is not the same thing as the expected lifespan of today's new car.
In a growing fleet, new purchases expand the fleet and necessarily lower the average age. On the other hand, if production falls below replacement rates, the average age of the fleet will increase. Couldn't such a change reflect changes in demographics (number of new drivers added to population) or habits (amount of car-based travel) as much as car durability?
Also, wouldn't such fleet metrics be influenced by the lumpy history of natural disasters like hurricanes flooding densely populated coastal regions?
