Licensing and vehicle ownership: 2013

Main points

• During 2013 there were over 104 thousand new registrations in Wales, and 4 out of 5 of these, 85 thousand, were cars.
• At the end of 2013 there was a stock of 1.774 million vehicles licensed for use on the roads in Wales. Just over three quarters, 1.347 million, of these were cars. The vehicles licensed in Wales came to around 5% of the total licensed for Great Britain as a whole.
• The level of the vehicle stock in Wales means that there were 475 cars licensed for every thousand people in Wales at the end of 2013; in addition there were 18 motorcycles, 58 light goods vehicles and 7 heavy goods vehicles for every thousand people.
• During 2013, the average CO2 emissions from a car registered during the year were 18% lower compared with the average CO2 emissions from cars registered five years earlier, in 2007. Comparing all the cars registered at the end of 2013 with all those registered at the end of 2008 shows that the average CO2 emissions across the stock of cars as a whole fell by 7%.
• At the end of 2013 there were 787 thousand diesel powered vehicles in Wales, 44.3% of the total. There were 977 thousand petrol powered vehicles, 55.0% of the total. The remaining 0.6% of the vehicles in Wales, 11 thousand vehicles, was powered by alternative fuels (that is by electric, hybrid, natural gas and so on). Of these 4,300 were electric powered, 400 more than at the end of 2012.