The short and long tail of Cars

Part oneThe short tail

§How many cars are there, and how fast are we making more?

Roughly 1.6 billion vehicles were on the world's roads at the last global count, and the factories build close to 100 million more each year. That count, by OICA, the carmakers' international federation, was for 2020. It found 1.59 billion vehicles in use, counting cars and commercial vehicles together. That's about 209 for every 1,000 people.

That average hides an enormous spread. The same table gives the United States 860 vehicles per 1,000 people and Japan 612, against 223 in China and 33 in India. Production has moved toward the growth: China built 34.5 million vehicles in 2025, more than a third of the world's output, and India built 6.49 million.

The number that surprises people is how slowly the fleet turns over. In the US in 2024, 16 million new vehicles joined a fleet of 289 million and about 4.5 percent were scrapped; by 2025 the average vehicle on the road was 12.8 years old. Divide 289 by 16 and you get about 18.

So even if every new car sold in America changed tomorrow, the roads would take the better part of two decades to catch up. Traffic is a picture of what people bought ten or fifteen years ago. Any new idea in cars, electric or otherwise, spreads through the showroom in a few years and through the street much more slowly.

§When did the car become ordinary?

The car was invented in the 1880s, but in America it became ordinary between about 1910 and 1930, when its price fell from more than a year's pay to a couple of months'.

The invention is easy to date. Carl Benz filed his patent for a "vehicle with gas engine" on 29 January 1886. It had three wheels because, as Benz later admitted, he couldn't solve the theory of steering. His first four-wheeler, the Victoria, arrived in 1893, once he had designed a steering system that worked.

Making the car ordinary took a different kind of invention. Ford's Model T went on sale in 1908, at $850 for the touring car. The Henry Ford museum puts the average 1909 wage at $544 a year, so a Model T cost about 19 months of pay.

Then Ford moved the work instead of the workers. On the moving line at Highland Park, a Model T took a little over one and a half man-hours to assemble by mid-1914, against twelve and a half before. The pace was punishing. By late 1913 staff turnover had reached 380 percent a year, and in January 1914 Ford answered with the $5 day: five dollars for eight hours, replacing $2.34 for nine.

Let's work it through to 1925, when the touring car cost $290 and the roadster $260.

The earnings come from the Census Bureau's historical series for all employees while employed. Two things happened at once: the sticker price fell by two-thirds, and pay more than doubled. Prices in general rose too, from 91 to 175 on the same source's index, so the 1909 price was worth about $1,630 in 1925 money. In real terms, the car lost more than four-fifths of its price.

The roads filled accordingly. America had 458,377 registered automobiles in 1910, 8.1 million in 1920 and 23 million in 1930, fifty times as many in twenty years. The fifteen-millionth Model T left the line on 26 May 1927.

§Which cars does almost everyone drive?

A handful of nameplates and one body style. The biggest name in history is the Toyota Corolla, which has sold more than 57 million since its launch in 1966, counted to March 2026. That's one Corolla roughly every 33 seconds for sixty years.

In the US, Ford's F-Series pickups have been America's best-selling truck for 49 years running. That counts the whole F-Series family. Count single models and the answer can change: in early 2025, JATO Dynamics data showed the F-150 was no longer America's number one vehicle, and the Toyota RAV4 was.

The world's single best-selling model is a close race between a petrol crossover and an electric one. JATO Dynamics, which tracks sales in about 150 markets, put the Tesla Model Y on top in 2023 with 1.22 million sales. For 2024 its figures, as reported by CarExpert, put the Toyota RAV4 back in front by 1,187,000 to 1,185,000.

The same JATO data shows which body style won: SUVs made up close to 47 percent of global passenger-car sales in 2023. In the US fleet, S&P Global's 2025 figures show fewer than 100 million passenger cars for the first time since the 1970s, as buyers keep shifting to light trucks, the American category that takes in pickups and SUVs.

§Who actually makes a car?

The company on the badge designs the car, assembles it and sells it, but much of what's inside comes from suppliers most drivers have never heard of. CLEPA, the European suppliers' association, says European suppliers make 75 percent of each vehicle produced in Europe. That's the suppliers' own lobby speaking, and it doesn't say whether it means value or parts, but the direction is clear. The largest supplier is Bosch, and the hundred biggest suppliers together took in €1,135 billion in 2023.

Sometimes the badge's owner doesn't even assemble the car. The Mercedes G-Class, the boxy off-roader, has been built since 1979 by Magna in Graz, Austria, which passed 500,000 of them in 2023 and has built 31 different models there.

Two badges can also share one car. Toyota's GR86 sports car was jointly developed with Subaru and is built at Subaru's Gunma plant, next to its twin, the Subaru BRZ. And one company can own a crowd of badges: Stellantis runs 14 car brands, from Fiat and Peugeot to Jeep, Ram and Maserati.

The deepest sharing is the part nobody sees: the platform, the set of engineering decisions underneath the body. That's where the sameness of the short tail is really manufactured.

§Why do most cars look and work alike?

Because they solve the same problem, under the same rules, with shared parts. Three forces do most of the work.

The first is a layout. In 1959 Alec Issigonis's Mini turned the engine sideways, put the gearbox underneath it in the sump and drove the front wheels. The whole powertrain became one compact block ahead of the passengers, leaving 75 percent of a ten-foot car for the people inside. The British Motor Museum, which holds the first Morris-badged Mini, notes that the sideways-engine, front-wheel-drive layout "has become the accepted standard for small cars".

The second is the platform. Volkswagen's MQB, short for its modular transverse toolkit (transverse meaning sideways, the Mini's layout again), arrived in 2012 under the Audi A3 and the seventh-generation VW Golf. By 2022 it had carried more than 32 million vehicles, from the Polo hatchback to the Atlas SUV. VW standardised even the angle of the engine: every one is tilted rearward by 12 degrees, intake at the front and exhaust at the back. The payoff shows in the parts bin, where the number of heating and air-conditioning units fell from 102 versions to 28.

Within that toolkit, wheelbase, track and seat position can still vary, which is how one set of decisions produces both a small hatchback and a large SUV. A platform fixes the expensive things and leaves the visible ones free.

The third force is the rulebook. An EU regulation adopted in 2009 required a new car's front to pass tests in which a child-sized or adult-sized head form strikes the bonnet at 35 km/h; since 2022 the EU has relied instead on a UN rule with the same test. A head needs room to slow down, so the bonnet has to sit clear of the hard engine beneath it. Where designers can't find that room, they fit an active bonnet, whose rear pops up when sensors detect an impact. Every maker sits the same tests, so the answers converge.

§Why does an electric car feel so different?

Because an electric motor pulls hardest from a standstill, takes energy back when you slow down, and wastes far less of what it's given.

A petrol engine can't pull from a standstill on its own. It has to be kept spinning, and it works well only across a limited range of speeds, which is why it needs a clutch and a gearbox to match it to the wheels. An electric motor has no such problem. BMW's 2013 description of its i3 is typical: the motor puts maximum torque of 250 newton metres on tap from the moment the car pulls away and drives the wheels through a single-speed transmission. There's nothing to shift, so the shove arrives without a pause.

Lift off the pedal and the motor becomes a generator. Regenerative braking uses the turning wheels to spin the motor, which slows the car while charging the battery. BMW tuned the i3 so strongly this way that, it said, a driver thinking ahead in city traffic could do 75 percent of their braking without touching the brake pedal.

The efficiency gap is where the numbers get dramatic. The EPA treats 33.7 kilowatt-hours of electricity as equal in energy to one gallon of petrol, and rates electric cars in miles per that amount (MPGe). The 2025 Tesla Model Y Long Range AWD scores 117 MPGe. A 2025 all-wheel-drive RAV4 with a petrol engine manages 28 to 30 mpg. The same energy carries the Tesla about four times as far.

Where does the difference go? Mostly into heat. The US government's fuel-economy site says petrol cars turn only about 12 to 30 percent of their fuel's energy into power at the wheels, while electric cars convert over 77 percent of the electricity they draw. Its more detailed breakdown puts a petrol car's losses inside the engine, mostly as heat, at 68 to 72 percent of its fuel in mixed driving. One caveat: MPGe counts electricity at the plug, so the whole-system comparison depends on how that electricity was made.

The ratings also flip in a revealing way. The petrol RAV4 does better on the highway (33 to 35 mpg) than in town (25 to 27), because in town a petrol car idles at lights and runs its engine less efficiently: the same breakdown gives 14 to 20 percent of fuel energy reaching the wheels in the city, against 22 to 30 on the highway. The Model Y does better in town (123 MPGe) than on the highway (111), because it recovers its braking energy in stop-start traffic, while on the motorway air resistance, which climbs steeply with speed, takes over. Hold that thought for the Bugatti.

Then there's weight. The i3's battery alone weighed about 230 kilograms, nearly a fifth of the car's 1,195, laid flat in the floor. BMW credited that low, central mass with a significantly lower centre of gravity, which is part of why an electric car can feel planted in corners.