There were around 33.2 million passenger cars in operation in the United Kingdom in 2022. UK roads have become busier since experiencing the most significant decline in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis. It remains to be seen whether the coronavirus crisis will cause a similar dent in the graph.

Car ownership per household

The majority of car owners in the UK have one car available to them. As of 2018, 53 percent of motorists had one vehicle in their household. Only one percent of respondents owned five cars or more.

Road safety The number of car drivers involved in reported road accidents in Great Britain fell to a record-low of just under 160,000 in 2019. The age group of under 16 year olds witnessed a sharp drop in the number of traffic-related fatalities in 2019. That said, all other age groups reported an increase in fatalities between 2018 and 2019.

The Ford Fiesta was the most common passenger car to be found on roads in the United Kingdom at the end of 2018. It began production in the 1970s and is currently in its seventh generation. Since then, the number of registered models has grown to over 1.5 million units. The Fiesta was followed by another Ford model, the 1998 released Focus.
The U.S. based automobile manufacturer began selling vehicles to the UK from the early twentieth century onwards and has since become one of the most beloved car brands in the country.

Best-selling models 2018

Not only was the Ford Fiesta the model with the greatest number of cumulative registrations, it has also remained popular to this day and, as of 2018, it was the best-selling car model in the UK. Close to 96,000 units were sold that year, putting it far ahead of its nearest competitor – Volkswagen Golf.

Ford sales in the UK

Ford sold some 254,000 cars in the UK in 2018. Monthly figures for March and September were noticeably higher than those for other months as this was when the Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency issued registrations plates.

This statistic illustrates the number of passenger cars registered in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1990 to 2017, in thousand vehicles. In the period of consideration, UK's stock of passenger cars presented a trend of continuous growth. In 2017, 32. 2 million passenger cars were registered in the UK. This value represents an increase of **** percent in comparison with 1990.

This statistic shows a forecast of the share of new connected vehicles on roads in the United Kingdom between 2018 and 2030. Forecasts suggest that 100 percent of all new vehicles registered would be connected by 2026. In 2019, the share of connected vehicles was estimated to amount to ** percent.

Forecast: Number of Road Motor Vehicles in the UK 2022 - 2026 Discover more data with ReportLinker!

The statistics refer to the volume of road traffic in Wales by type of vehicle. Road traffic estimates for Wales are compiled by the Department for Transport on behalf of the Welsh Government. These estimates are based on the annual roadside manual road traffic counts carried out across Wales during the year. These roadside counts are combined with automatic traffic count (ATC) data and road lengths to produce overall traffic estimates. Traffic estimates for major roads are based on a census of all such roads whereas traffic estimates for minor roads are estimated by calculating growth rates from a fixed sample of count points on the minor road network. Further details of the methodology are available from the DfT at the link below: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/road-traffic-speeds-and-congestion-statistics-guidance. The analysis by vehicle type is based on roadside observation where vehicles are classified according to their general appearance. The vehicle types identified are: 1) Pedal cycles: Includes all non-motorised cycles, 2) Motorcycles: Two-wheeled motor vehicles, including mopeds, motor scooters and motorcycle combinations, 3) Cars and taxis: Includes estate cars, all light vans with windows to the rear of the driver's seat, passenger vehicles with 9 seats or fewer, three-wheeled cars, motorised-invalid carriages, Land Rovers, Range Rovers and Jeeps. Cars towing caravans or trailers are counted as one vehicle, 4) Buses and coaches: Includes all public service vehicles and works buses other than vehicles with less than 10 seats, 5) Light vans: All goods vehicles up to 3,500kg gross vehicle weight. This includes all car-based vans and those of the next larger carrying-capacity, such as transit vans. Also included are ambulances, pick-ups, milk floats and pedestrian-controlled motor vehicles. Most of this group are delivery vans of one type or another, 6) Goods vehicles: All goods vehicles over 3,500kg gross vehicle weight. Includes tractors (without trailers), road-rollers, box vans and similar large vans. A two-axle motor tractor unit without trailer is also included, 7) All motor vehicles: All vehicles except pedal cycles. Traffic volume is measured using Vehicle Kilometres (VKM), which are calculated by multiplying the annual average daily flow of traffic by the corresponding length of road. For example, 1 vehicle travelling 1 kilometre a day for a year would be 365 VKM over a year.

Roadside survey of vehicle registration marks. Dataset consists of photographs of cars on the UK road network, and auto-captured number plate data, for purposes of estimating rate of Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) evasion, and estimating proportion of foreign-registered vehicles on British roads. Photos are taken at c. 200 sites around UK each June. Roughly 1.5-1.7 million marks captured per year. Survey now moved to biennially rather than annually, operating in odd-numbered years from 2011 onwards.

This statistic shows the total number of light commercial vehicles on the road in the United Kingdom (UK) between 2007 and 2015. The number of LCVs on the road has consistently been growing. However, even though this number is increasing, it should also be taken into account that the average age of cars on the road is also increasing, meaning that fewer LCV owners are replacing their old vehicles.

Quarterly statistics on the total number of taxed and SORNed (Statutory Off Road Notification) FSO CARS vehicles in the UK. The data is compiled from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) vehicle licensing statistics, covering the period from 1994 Q4 to 2025 Q1.

Context

The UK government amassed traffic data from 2000 and 2016, recording over 1.6 million accidents in the process and making this one of the most comprehensive traffic data sets out there. It's a huge picture of a country undergoing change.

Note that all the contained accident data comes from police reports, so this data does not include minor incidents.

Content

ukTrafficAADF.csv tracks how much traffic there was on all major roads in the given time period (2000 through 2016). AADT, the core statistic included in this file, stands for "Average Annual Daily Flow", and is a measure of how activity a road segment based on how many vehicle trips traverse it. The AADT page on Wikipedia is a good reference on the subject.

Accidents data is split across three CSV files: accidents_2005_to_2007.csv, accidents_2009_to_2011.csv, and accidents_2012_to_2014.csv. These three files together constitute 1.6 million traffic accidents. The total time period is 2005 through 2014, but 2008 is missing.

A data dictionary for the raw dataset at large is available from the UK Department of Transport website here. For descriptions of individual columns, see the column metadata.

Acknowledgements

The license for this dataset is the Open Givernment Licence used by all data on data.gov.uk (here). The raw datasets are available from the UK Department of Transport website here.

Inspiration

• How has changing traffic flow impacted accidents?
• Can we predict accident rates over time? What might improve accident rates?
• Plot interactive maps of changing trends, e.g. How has London has changed for cyclists? Busiest roads in the nation?
• Which areas never change and why? Identify infrastructure needs, failings and successes.
• How have Rural and Urban areas differed (see RoadCategory)? How about the differences between England, Scotland, and Wales?
• The UK government also like to look at miles driven. You can do this by multiplying the AADF by the corresponding length of road (link length) and by the number of days in the years. What does this tell you about UK roads?

Context

What would we use this dataset for? Firstly, crime prevention and detection. Following on, so much more else too, like finer traffic control management. Want to make a case to your local council for building that bypass around your village, already?

Content

With a comprehensive set of images of each of the popular vehicle brands, it should be possible to "teach" a machine-learning application to recognize car brands in real time from live video and camera observations. This gives an added attribute to a vehicle-of-interest's registration / license plate, or at least provides some backup information where the license plate could not be read.

These images have all been manually curated to prevent any ambiguities in the ML process, and advertisements and other useless vehicle views (like vehicle interiors and photos of your smiling salesman) have been removed.

Acknowledgements

The data collection process is described in https://github.com/gerritonagoodday/VehicleBrandDatasetScraping and used web scraping from popular car deal websites. I used ScrapingBee to do the web scraping where websites had put up obstacles to prevent web scraping.

If you want to enhance the dataset further or create datasets for other countries besides the UK, you can make a few configuration changes in the Python scripts. You will also need your own API key, at $29 per month. Sign up through this link and get your own API key:

https://www.scrapingbee.com?fpr=nobnose-inc27

Inspiration

Southern Africa has a huge problem with crime, corruption, and wildlife poaching. Much of this crime is committed by government officials, directly or indirectly. The problem to secure convictions has always been to pinpoint the culprits with irrefutable evidence within an already corrupt judiciary system. This could go some way towards achieving this.

Intro

The UK government publishes a vast amount of datasets generally in CSV or XLS formats. These are generally unsuitable for data analysis and need reformatting to a longdata.

This dataset is from the Department for Transport and Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and details

Make and model by engine size, Vehicles registered at the end of the year by licence status, body type, make, generic model, model, fuel type and engine size for the UK

Scope: All licensed vehicles in the United Kingdom; annually from 2014

Schema: BodyType, Make, GenModel, Model, Fuel, EngineSizeSimple, EngineSizeDesc, LicenceStatus, [number of vehicles; one column per year]

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6489e73ab32b9e0012a967f7/df_VEH0220.csv

##

London was home to some *** million passenger cars in 2020. Between 1995 and 2020, the number of licensed cars in the capital city saw a net increase of ** percent, although figures have declined in the last two years recorded. Overall, there were some **** million cars in the United Kingdom in 2020. London has the longest metro network in Europe. However, despite efforts to promote public transportation as a way to reduce fossil fuel intensive car driving, the motor vehicle still proved popular.

Pollution fighting schemes

In recent years, the Greater London Authority has increased incentives to stifle car usage in the city center. It introduced the Congestion Charge Zone in 2003, the Low Emission Zone in 2008, and followed up with the Ultra Low Emission Zone in early 2019, which are all intended to reduce traffic pollution and improve air quality. On average, around *** million unique vehicles traversed the Congestion Charge Zone every month in 2018.

Car-sharing: a means to reduce car ownership

According to a 2018 survey, members of car-sharing clubs in London are more likely to own no cars of their own after joining. While more than half of those participating in car sharing associations were already car-less before becoming members, the share increased to ** percent after. Vehicle sales in the UK declined dramatically amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.