How many cars are there in the world?
How many cars are there in the world?
about 1.5 billion motor vehicles
About one vehicle for every five and a half people alive. Parked end to end, the world's cars would stretch six and a half million kilometres — seventeen times the distance to the Moon.
There are roughly 1.5 billion motor vehicles in use worldwide, of which about 1.1 billion are passenger cars and the rest commercial vehicles. Around 70 to 90 million new vehicles are produced each year while perhaps 40 million are scrapped, so the fleet grows by tens of millions annually. Distribution is extremely uneven: the United States has about 850 vehicles per 1,000 people, China about 230, India about 60. The average car is parked roughly 95% of the time.
How the figure is arrived at
National vehicle registration databases, aggregated by the international manufacturers' association. Registration is the reliable part; the difficulty is deciding when to remove a vehicle that has been abandoned rather than formally scrapped, which several countries handle badly and which inflates fleet counts.
How confident it is
- Low estimate
- 1,400,000,000
- High estimate
- 1,700,000,000
- Spread
- 1.2× between the bounds
Other things people built counts
- How many countries are there in the world? 195 — or 193, or 206, or 249, depending on who is counting
- How many planes are in the air right now? roughly 10,000 to 20,000 at any moment
- How many languages are there in the world? about 7,150 living languages
- How many McDonald's are there? about 43,000 in over 100 countries
- How many phones are there in the world? about 8.9 billion mobile connections — more than there are people
- How many nuclear weapons are there? about 12,200 warheads
- How many websites are there? about 1.1 billion hostnames — but only around 200 million active
- How many books have ever been published? about 130 million as of 2010 — probably over 200 million now
- How many airports are there in the world? about 45,000 with runways — but only around 4,000 with scheduled airline service
- How many ATMs are there in the world? about 3 million
- How many cities are there in the world? about 10,000 with over 50,000 people; 33 megacities over 10 million
- How many buildings are there in the world? somewhere between 1.5 and 4 billion
- How many computers are there in the world? roughly 2 billion personal computers in use
- How many miles of road are there in the world? about 64 million km — roughly 40 million miles
Common questions
- How many cars are there in the world?
- about 1.5 billion motor vehicles
- How is that estimated?
- National vehicle registration databases, aggregated by the international manufacturers' association. Registration is the reliable part; the difficulty is deciding when to remove a vehicle that has been abandoned rather than formally scrapped, which several countries handle badly and which inflates fleet counts.
Related pages
- How many countries are there in the world? 195 — or 193, or 206, or 249, depending on who is counting
- How many planes are in the air right now? roughly 10,000 to 20,000 at any moment
- How many languages are there in the world? about 7,150 living languages
- How many McDonald's are there? about 43,000 in over 100 countries
- How many phones are there in the world? about 8.9 billion mobile connections — more than there are people
- How many nuclear weapons are there? about 12,200 warheads
- How many websites are there? about 1.1 billion hostnames — but only around 200 million active
- How many books have ever been published? about 130 million as of 2010 — probably over 200 million now
- How many people are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many stars are there in the universe? Space and the universe
- How many bones are in the human body? The human body
- How many grains of sand are there on Earth? Living things and the natural world
- How many ants are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
- How many trees are there in the world? Living things and the natural world
Sources
- Typical range compiled from manufacturer specifications — At One Place