Ontario is home to a lot of those vehicles, of course. Canada's largest province had 5,878,639 vehicles in 1992, 6,054,565 in 1997 (the last year officially counted), and could have 6,441,095 in 2002.
It will also not be a surprise that more of those vehicles are light trucks, since they make up about 37 per cent of all vehicle registrations in 1999, versus only 28 per cent in 1992. The number will go up to 42 per cent in 2002, if current trends continue.
Having more vehicles on the road implies that there are more people driving them, and the AIA study notes that that is true. In 1997, there were 20,147,700 licensed drivers in Canada, versus 18,465,100 in 1992.
That means there are more vehicles per person than ever before (0.60 in 1995 from 0.48 in 1975) and more vehicles per household (1.90 in 1975 to 2.22 in 1995) with slight increases expected (0.61 and 2.23) by 2000.
After aging noticeably from 1992 to 1997 (7.4 years to 8.2 years on average), Canada's vehicle fleet got slightly younger (8.1 years) in 1998 and should be at 8.0 in 2002.
As more and more people move into new or newer cars, we can look for increasing numbers of them to get rid of their old vehicles. In 1997, Canadians scrapped 924,159 vehicles, but that number should grow steadily until it reaches 1,220,893 in 2002.