Status: 09/15/2022 10:54 a.m
More and more cars are on German roads. There are significant differences between the federal states. Overall, the number of cars is increasing significantly faster than the population.
Despite the debate about a traffic turnaround because of climate change, there are more and more cars in Germany. According to the Federal Statistical Office, there were 580 cars for every 1,000 inhabitants last year. According to the Wiesbaden authorities, the car density has increased continuously over the past ten years. In 2011 there were therefore 517 cars per 1000 inhabitants.
“The reason for the increase in car density is that the number of cars registered in Germany has increased significantly more than the population in the period mentioned,” the statisticians explained this trend. According to figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority, 48.5 million cars were registered as of January 1, 2022, more than ever before. For comparison: in 2011 there were only 42.3 million.
The regional differences in car density are large: last year it was highest in the western German states of Saarland (658 cars per 1000 inhabitants), Rhineland-Palatinate (632) and Bavaria (622). The city states of Berlin (337), Hamburg (435) and Bremen (438) had the lowest values - “among other things due to a particularly dense public transport network”, as it was said.
The eastern German federal states not only had values for 2021 that were below the national average. According to the Federal Office, the number of cars there has increased less than in Germany as a whole since 2011.
A good quarter of households have two cars
According to calculations, a good three quarters of households in Germany owned at least one car last year. Just over a quarter of households had two cars. 6.1 percent had three or more cars. The proportion of electric cars is increasing rapidly, albeit from a low level. “At the beginning of 2022, 1.3 percent of the passenger cars registered in Germany were electric cars. A year earlier, the proportion was 0.6 percent,” according to the statisticians.
In all other member states of the European Union, too, car density has increased in a ten-year comparison. In the list of countries with the most cars per 1000 inhabitants in the EU, Germany was last in eighth place. The top places are occupied by Luxembourg (682), Italy (670) and Poland (664). The car density was lowest in Romania (379), Latvia (390) and Hungary (403).