It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the most common cars found on American roads are old domestic vehicles. According to Experian’s Q3 2021 Vehicles In Operation (VIO) chart approximately half of the 283 million vehicles currently in operation in the USA are from Ford, GM, or Stellantis. And the lion’s share of them consist of old Chevrolet, GMC, Dodge Ram, and Ford vehicles, likely trucks and SUVs.
The data is collected and published quarterly in Automotive News.
2006 Ford F-150. Photo via Ford
General Motors leads the Detroit Three trio with more than 61 million vehicles currently registered on the road. The data is even broken out into branded subgroups: 39 million vehicles wear the Chevrolet bowtie, while a further 10 million reside under the GMC umbrella. Buick and Cadillac tally 4 and 3 million vehicles respectively, with a further million vehicles attributed to each Pontiac and Saturn. Interestingly, there are still some 215,445 Hummers still on the road, 473,659 Oldsmobiles, and 106,906 Geos still running around.
Moving down the road to Dearborn, FoMoCo branded products account for 46 million vehicles on the road. 43 million of those vehicles wear the blue oval, Lincoln accounts for just over 2 million cars, while the now-defunct Mercury brand still accounts for more than a million cars. Of note, there are still 1,106 Merkurs listed as on the road. If you recall Merkur was a mid-to-late ’80s attempt to sell European Ford products in the United States following the success of the imported Mercury Capri during the ’70s.
On the Stellantis side, the newly formed French-American company inherits the responsibility of 34 million cars, trucks and SUVs. Dodge is carrying the torch with 12 million vehicles on the road, closely followed by Jeep with 11 million. Other notables include 5 million Ram trucks, 4 million Chryslers, 160,763 Plymouth vehicles, 11,868 AMCs, and 9,602 Eagles. Special shout out to the 97 people who own and operate Lancias, and the further 630 Peugeot owners out there.
With 35 million vehicles registered, the Toyota brand itself actually accounts for more vehicles on the road than the entire Stellantis portfolio. All of them are probably old Tacomas and Camrys. Also of note, there are now more Teslas (910,045) on the road than there are Porsches (829,011).
Are you one of the proud millions keeping an old domestic vehicle on the road? Let us know in the comments below!
