Matt Prior

The average car in the UK is the oldest it has ever been. That's the headline from the RAC Foundation, which has found that, as of the end of last year, the average car in the UK was nine years and 10 months old. Nearly a decade ago, at the end of 2015, the average age of a car was only seven years and five months.

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For petrol and diesel cars, perhaps obviously, their average age is even older: 10 years and four months and 10 years and one month respectively. Pluggable cars are much younger.

What's the cause? The RAC Foundation thinks a few things. For one, cars are able to last longer.

“The days of them rusting away before your eyes are well and truly behind us,” said Steve Gooding, the transport research charity's director. “Even a 20-year-old car with a full service history can be a good bet for someone seeking a bargain buy that still looks up to date.”

I know this to be true. The average age of my family’s four daily drivers is just under 20 years old, none of them has needed any welding, and yet with minimal servicing we expect the Audi, Volkswagen and Mazda to pass an MOT test without much bother (the Land Rover Defender, as something of a specialist grotbox, is a little different, but nothing it has needed so far has been structural).