There's a potential wrinkle to these stats in the US. The "cash for clunkers" program, obstinately a boon for fuel efficiency, or a giveaway to auto manufacturers, depending on how you look at it, took a massive number of used cars off the road.<p>Higher reliability and the pandemic definitely have something to do with it. But so does the long slow recovery of the used car market after something like a million perfectly good cars were destroyed.<p>Less new vehicles are being purchased because there's ample supply of serviceable post-clunkers used ones