Summary of the 2002 Summer Analysis
This is a summary of an analysis I did in the summer/fall of 2002. The purpose of the analysis was to calculate a current, reasonable estimate of the number of unfixed, recalled vehicles that remain registered, and out driving on our roads today. I wanted this more current number so I could compare it to earlier estimates, to see how much better or worse the problem has gotten over the past several years. All data used came from various branches of the federal government, and the most current data set available at that time was used whenever possible.
The Federal Highway Administration is the government agency that keeps track of the number and kinds of registered motor vehicles on our roads, and their data for the year 2000 was the most recent available. That data shows the total number of registered motor vehicles to be 221,475,173. This number does not include motorcycles, but it does include private, commercial and government-owned automobiles, buses and trucks of all kinds (including pickups and other light-duty trucks, SUV’s, vans, farm trucks and tractor-trailers).
The vast majority of these vehicles - 210,044,113 of them, which is 94.84% of all registered vehicles - are private and commercial automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks. In other words, these are the personal or family vehicles most of us own, and the company vehicles some of us drive at work. For these reasons, they are the types of vehicles we are interested in for this analysis.
Another set of data the Federal Highway Administration keeps track of, has to do with the age of the vehicles on our roads. They do their own study every 5 years, but in the 4 years between their own studies, they rely on data from Ward’s Communications. The latest data the FHA was reporting is the 1999 Ward’s data, which says that the statistical mean, or “average” age of all vehicles on the road is 8.9 years, or about 8 years and 11 months.
The Ward’s Communications data also reports that the median vehicle age is 8.3 years, or about 8 years and 4 months. We know from the field of Statistics, that by definition, if the median vehicle age is known to be 8.3 years, this tells us that half the vehicles on the road are newer than 8.3 years old, and the remaining half are older than 8.3 years old.
At this point, for reasons that should make sense to you soon, we need to break the analysis down into two parts. First, we will deal with the younger, or newer half of the registered vehicles, which are those that are less than 8.3 years old. Then later, we will address the older half of the vehicles, which are those older than 8.3 years old.
First, The Newer Vehicles
The next set of numbers we need are the vehicle recall figures from NHTSA. Looking first at their recall figures for just the last 8.3 years, NHTSA reports that from roughly the last .3 of 1993, through the end of 2001 (8.3 years), there were approximately 2,656 different vehicle recall campaigns for various safety problems, involving a total of approximately 134,747,367 vehicles of all types.
Not too surprisingly, roughly 95% of these recalled vehicles – which is approximately 128,010,000 of them – are privately or commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks, just as we saw that roughly 95% of all registered vehicles are of these same types.
NHTSA also keeps track of how many recalled vehicles are repaired under each recall campaign, and to quote them, “Currently, 72 percent of the owners of vehicles with safety problems have the recall work performed”. The flip side of this of course, is that currently, 28% of the owners do not have the recall work performed. Believe it or not, these current figures are actually an improvement over what they have been in the recent past. Back in 1996 for example, NHTSA was reporting that only 68% of recalled vehicles were being fixed, which of course, means that the remaining 32% of those vehicles were not being fixed.
So, to determine the number of privately and commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that were recalled over the last 8.3 years, but not fixed, we simply multiply the percentage of vehicles that were not fixed, by the number of those same types of vehicles that were recalled. Now, although the percentage of recalled vehicles that were not fixed was as high as 32% at times over the last 8.3 years, if we use just the lower, current figure of 28%, we’ll be understating the problem a bit, if anything. Doing the math, 128,009,999 x .28 = 35,842,800 vehicles that were recalled in the last 8.3 years, but not fixed.
Of course, not all these vehicles are still on the road today. Surely, many were removed from service for the same reasons that any other vehicle might be – i.e., being driven so many miles that they finally just wore out, being totaled in an accident, etc. We are interested in knowing how many of these vehicles are still on the road, and while nobody has taken an exact count of them, we can arrive at a fairly close, reasonable estimate, in the following way.
We have already seen that the Federal Highway Administration’s 2000 data tells us there are a total of approximately 210,044,113 private and commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks on our roads today. Since they also report that the median vehicle age is 8.3 years, we also know that half of these registered vehicles, or 105,022,056 of them, are newer than 8.3 years old.
By comparing this number of vehicles newer than 8.3 years old that are still registered, to the total number of new autos, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that were sold over the same 8.3 year period - which is 126,993,000, according to data published in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 21 – we’ll have the percentage of all these vehicles that were sold as new over those 8.3 years, that are still registered. So, the 105,022,056 vehicles that are still registered, divided by all 126,993,000 new vehicles that were sold, equals .827, or 82.7%. Again, what this tells us, is that 82.7% of all the vehicles of the types we’re interested in, that were sold as “new” over those 8.3 years, are still registered and on our roads.
Now, if we were to use this same 82.7% as an estimate of the percentage of the 35,842,800 unfixed, recalled vehicles that are still on the road today, we probably wouldn’t be far off. But just for good measure, if we reduce it, say by another 10 percentage points, to 72.7%, this will help insure that if anything, our estimate understates the actual number of problem vehicles a bit. So, 35,842,800 x .727 = 26,057,716 vehicles of the type we are concerned with, that were recalled in just the last 8.3 years, but never fixed, that are still registered and out on our roads today.
Now, For The Older Vehicles
Now we are ready to look at the older half of the vehicles, which are those over 8.3 years old, and we will do this in the same general way we did above with the younger vehicles. But first, again with help from the field of Statistics, we need to make one additional calculation concerning these older vehicles that we did not have to make with the younger vehicles.
When we looked at the younger vehicles above, we knew that 100% of them fell within the rather narrow age range of from zero, to 8.3 years old. But with the older half of the registered vehicles, the age range is much more open-ended, because it includes any vehicle over 8.3 years old, up to and including vehicles like a 93 year old, 1909 Ford Model T.
Since motor vehicles wear out with use, and over time, common sense tells us that as more time passes, there are likely to be fewer and fewer vehicles from any given model year that are still in good enough working order to remain registered, and on the road. So we would expect to see most of the older vehicles being reasonably close to 8.3 years old, with relatively few being say, 25 or 30 years old, or older.
What we want to know is this: Of all these 105,022,056 older, registered, private and commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that are older than 8.3 years old, approximately how many of them are between 8.3 and 16.6 years old? These would be the vehicles that are from zero to 8.3 years older than the median vehicle age of 8.3 years, just as the younger vehicles were from zero to 8.3 years younger than the median vehicle age. The reason that we are only interested in those older vehicles that are from 8.3 to 16.6 years old (meaning that we are going to ignore all the vehicles that are more than 16.6 years old) has to do with something we know from the field of Statistics.
Without getting too technical, Statisticians have a tool they call the z-score, which tells them that with a large sample of data (like the millions of older registered vehicles we are interested in here), where the median age of all registered vehicles is known to be 8.3 years, and the statistical mean (average) age is 8.9 years, a very large percentage (95% to 99.7%, in fact) of the older vehicles will be between 8.3 and 16.6 years old. So, thanks to the z-score, we know that the percentage (and number) of vehicles that are over 16.6 years old is small enough that we can ignore them for the purposes of this analysis.
In keeping with our efforts to insure that any calculation errors we make will tend to understate the total number of unfixed recalled vehicles on our roads, let’s assume that only 90% (rather than 95 to 99.7%) of the older vehicles are between 8.3 and 16.6 years old. So, 105,022,056 x .90 = 94,519,850 of these older vehicles that we can safely say are between 8.3 and 16.6 years old.
From this point on, we can analyze the data for the older registered vehicles in the same way, and in the same order, that we did for the younger vehicles.
Looking at NHTSA’s recall data for the 8.3 year period running from the last .6 of 1985, through the first .7 of 1993, there were approximately 1,680 different vehicle recall campaigns for various safety problems, involving a total of approximately 55,863,000 vehicles of all types. As with the younger vehicles, roughly 95% of these older vehicles, which is 53,069,850 of them, are of the type we are interested in - privately or commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks.
Just as we saw when analyzing the younger vehicles, not all the owners of these older recalled vehicles had the necessary, free repair work done to correct the safety problems. While the exact numbers reported by NHTSA change from time to time, the pattern over the past several years has been that 28% to 32% of all recalled vehicles do not get repaired, so we’ll split the difference, and call it 30%. So, 53,069,850 x .30 = 15,920,955 of the older, privately or commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that were recalled, but not fixed.
Our next step is to estimate how many of these 15,920,955 older, unfixed, recalled vehicles are still registered and on our roads today, and we will do this in the same way we did for the younger vehicles.
A moment ago, we estimated the number of private and commercially owned automobiles, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that are between 8.3 and 16.6 years old, that are still registered and on our roads, to be 94,519,850 vehicles.
So, by comparing this number of vehicles that are still registered, to the total number of new autos, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that were sold over the same 8.3 year period – which is 118,867,000, according to data published in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 21 – we’ll have the percentage of new vehicles that were sold back then, that are still registered today. So, the 94,519,850 vehicles that are still registered, divided by the total of 118,867,000 new vehicles that were sold back then, = .795, or 79.5%. Again, what this tells us, is that 79.5% of all the vehicles of the types we’re interested in, that were sold as “new” over those 8.3 years, are still registered and on our roads.
As was the case when we were analyzing the younger vehicles, If we were to use this same 79.5% as an estimate of the percentage of the 15,920,955 older, unfixed recalled vehicles that are still on the road today, we probably wouldn’t be far off. But again, just for good measure, we will reduce it by 10 percentage points, to 69.5%, which will again help insure that if anything, our estimate understates the actual number of problem vehicles a bit. So, 15,920,955 x .695 = 11,065,064 older vehicles that were recalled between 8.3 and 16.6 years ago, but never fixed, that are still registered, and on our roads.
Summarizing The Data
Now we are finally in a position to summarize all this data. First, for the newer vehicles, we calculated the number of the types of vehicles we are interested in, that were recalled in the last 8.3 years, but never fixed, that are still registered and on our roads, to be 26,057,716 vehicles. Adding to them the 11,065,064 older vehicles of the same type that were recalled over the prior 8.3 years (from 8.3 to 16.6 years ago), which were also never fixed, but are still registered and on the road today, gives us a total of 37,122,780 of these problem vehicles that are still registered, and out on our roads today.
These 37,122,780 unsafe vehicles represent 17.67%, or slightly more than 1 out of every 6 of all the 210,044,113 private and commercially owned autos, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that are currently registered and on the road.
This also means that statistically, slightly more than 1 out of every 3 households has at least 1 person who is regularly driving one of these unsafe vehicles – either one they own, or one they drive at work. Taking all the 210,044,113 private and commercially owned autos, SUV’s, vans, pickups and other light-duty trucks that are currently registered and on the road, and dividing by the total number of U.S. households - 104,705,000 as of 2000, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau data – tells us that there are an average of 2.0061 of these vehicles per household. This means that on average, for every 3 households, there are just over 6 of these vehicles, and 1 of these 6 vehicles is a problem vehicle that has been recalled, but not fixed.
Here’s another way to look at it – we can divide the total number of households by 3, to figure out how many households represent 1/3 of the total: 104,705,000 / 3 = 34,901,667 households, which again is 1/3, or 1 out of every 3 households. With there being 37,122,780 unfixed, recalled vehicles on our roads today, one can see that there are more than enough of these problem vehicles for 1 out of every 3 households to have one, with a couple million problem vehicles to spare.
Naturally, we are dealing with averages here – not every household is going to be associated with one of these problem vehicles. However, there are also going to be other households whose members may be driving 2, 3 or more of these problem vehicles.
The only way for you to know with any certainty whether any members of your household are unknowingly driving one of these unsafe, unfixed recalled vehicles is to do your homework, and follow the steps recommended here on our website.
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