Its getting congested out there
[I]World vehicle population tops 1 billion units[/I]New government statistics indicate there are now more than 1 billion vehicles on the road across the globe. In fact, it happened a year ago and was driven largely by booming demand in China and India.
The vehicle market explosion in China played a major role in overall vehicle population growth in 2010, with registrations jumping 27.5%, the government report said. Total vehicles in operation in the country climbed by more than 16.8 million units, to slightly more than 78 million. China now has the worlds second-largest vehicle population, ahead of Japan, with 73.9 million units. In India, vehicle population grew by 8.9% to 20.8 million units, compared with 19.1 million in 2009. Brazil experienced the second largest volume increase after China, with 2.5 million additional vehicle registrations in 2010.
By comparison, U.S. registrations grew less than 1% in 2010, but the countrys 239.8 million units continued to constitute the largest vehicle population in the world.
Measured as a ratio of vehicles to population, the U.S. still leads, with a ratio of 1:13 among a population of almost 310 million the highest vehicle-to-person ratio in the world. Italy was second with 1:14, France, Japan, and the U.K. followed, all of which fell in the 1:15 range.
In China, the ratio was 1:17 and in India it was 1.56.
The world vehicle population in 2010 passed the 1 billion-unit mark 24 years after reaching 500 million in 1986. Prior to that, the vehicle population doubled roughly every ten years, from 1950 to 1970, when it first reached the 250 million-unit threshold.
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