Aust-Agder tops vehicle scrapping statistics

Auto owners in Aust-Agder County in southern Norway delivered the most cars to scrapyards in relation to the total number of vehicles last year. Compared to a normal year, the raising of the salvage payment in 1996 triggered a near quadrupling in the number of cars sent to the crushers under Norway's Vehicle Buy-Back programme. Nearly two-thirds of the passenger cars taken off the roads were more than 15 years old.

The number of passenger cars and vans scrapped under the programme hit 223,499, a 247 per cent increase on the previous year. A total of 211,311 passenger cars were scrapped, accounting for 12.7 percent of the national fleet, up from 3.6 per cent the year before. The number of vans turned in totalled 12,188, 6.5 per cent of the fleet, up from 1.9 per cent in 1995.

Last year's "Scrap-it" campaign took a heavy toll on the number of Lada and Fiat passenger cars rolling down Norway's highways. Nearly 5,200 Russian-made Ladas - 43.3 per cent of the entire fleet - were scrapped. The corresponding share for Fiats was 27.3 per cent, or just barely 7,300 cars.

New Statistics

Auto scrapping programme, 1996.
Statistics are published annually in the Weekly Bulletin of Statistics and the Official Statistics of Norway (NOS) Transport and Communication Statistics. Regional figures will be published in NOS Regional Statistics. More information: Asbjørn Wethal, tel. +47 62 88 54 15, e-mail:aww@ssb.no or Jan Monsrud, tel. +47 62 88 54 07, e-mail: jam@ssb.no.

Weekly Bulletin issue no. 12, 1997