Romania is turning into a car graveyard. The number of cars over 20 years old has grown alarmingly

In the last year, Romania has had a worrying acceleration of the obsolescence of the car fleet, according to Profit.ro data, which shows that on January 1, compared to December 2024, a total of 400,000 more cars with an age of over 20 years were circulating.

All the years of the Rabla Program were useless, considering that Romania reached 3.4 million cars manufactured in 2006 at the latest, that is, they are more than two decades old, in accelerated growth from 3 million as of December 31, 2024.

The phenomenon was possible due to the very large number of second-hand cars imported from Europe in the last decade, cars that, at the time of registration in Romania, were already quite old. The age coincides, moreover, with the period since the country became a member of the European Union and the legislation opened the way for imports of used cars.

The famous environmental taxes imposed in those years have only succeeded in delaying this wave of second-hand cars, which seems to be increasingly choking the roads.

To these are added the new cars bought by Romanians in the boom years before the great crisis of 2008-2009, which have already started to become rable, but continue to circulate quietly on the roads. The indicator that attracts the most attention in these statistics is the share that the “over 20” age category reached: 39.1%, after last year it was at 35.9%, and in 2023 it was limited to 33%.

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