New vehicles in Canada are costing less and lasting longer, a study by the Automotive Industries Association (AIA) of Canada reports.
Among other findings, the study also shows that fewer people are paying cash for their new vehicles or doing maintenance work on their old vehicles, that there are more vehicles out there, that their average age was growing but is about to decline, and that we're driving them farther.
For the first time since 1990, the AIA study says, the amount of time it takes to buy a new vehicle in Canada actually went down in 1998. The average-earning Canadian needs 28.4 weeks of after-tax income to buy the average-priced car last year, the study reports, versus 28.7 weeks in 1997.
For comparison's sake, the Ottawa-based AIA notes, it took only 22.8 weeks of average after-tax income to buy the average-priced car in the U.S. last year, which was also down from the year before's 23.4 weeks.
The study ascribes this change to several factors, including the desire of buyers to have more features in their vehicles. But the AIA study says that government regulations for more safety and emissions standards also drove the average price up, as did the amount of more technological complexity in new vehicles, the dropping value of the Canadian dollar versus that of the U.S. and other key countries, stagnant incomes and (until recently) rising taxes.