Talk:List of countries and territories by motor vehicles per capita

New source for car ownership in ASEAN countries; from ASEANstats

Found a new source for statistics on car ownership in ASEAN on a yearly basis, on ASEANstats. Asking for someone to search up the ASEANstats car ownership page, verify its authenticity, and update the current numbers from the official page. Don't have the time at the moment to update it myself. Fazley01 (talk) 21:43, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

Gibraltar

The cited source for Gibraltar states that the data includes motorbike usage: [Transport Minister] "Remember too that the figures I'm presenting include not just cars but motorbikes and lorries and vans and all sorts of vehicles which are used for commercial purposes." I believe the official government report of this exchange for the purposes of clarification has not yet been published, that is the parliamentary session for the 21st of December 2022. (https://www.parliament.gi/proceedings-of-parliament/hansard?year=2022) This has been reported on by the local press, which states that the number of motorbikes is around 9,600, which would alter Gibraltar's placement in the list, although a concrete source should be found for this. Cselkcess (talk) 10:08, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Link to local press report: https://www.gbc.gi/news/wikipedia-points-gibraltar-having-highest-vehicle-ownership-capita-world-anomalies-warp-stats Cselkcess (talk) 11:00, 26 January 2023 (UTC)

Separate columns for credible sources covering multiple countries

Cars are counted differently by different entities (including: what types of cars are included). Current table mixes methodologies in a single column. Many countries come from articles with little credibility (even behind paywall). E.g. for EU the best source is Eurostat.

Next to current "mix" column, this table should have separate columns for methodologies/sources covering multiple countries where values come from a coherent methodology. KPiotr (talk) 17:40, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Wales, Scotland, United Kingdom etc

If Wales, Scotland, United Kingdom (etc) are both included in the table is that not double counting? For example Wales is currently number 28 and also part of number 36 the United Kingdom. Surely it should be one or the other, or perhaps both is included but only one is given a distinct number. Dunk the Lunk (talk) 17:20, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Incorrect data on the number of vehicles in Lesotho

I checked the source and found no information on the number of vehicles in the country. The current data may have been obtained by summarising the data in ‘Figure 16: Inbound foreign vehicles’ from section 5.1 Inbound statistic and showing ‘Foreign commercial vehicles that entered Lesotho's commercial border posts from January 2016 to October 2016 are shown below in Figure 16’ 2A02:2698:6C2E:7E73:CC6F:DB50:ABFE:B9F7 (talk) 02:34, 1 June 2024 (UTC)

Proposed deletion

I have proposed this article for deletion due to a number of reasons which I will explain below. I have followed this article for a while now and myself have incorrectly used the statistic linked in this article which included a source that included non-motorized trailers as "vehicles", which accounted for about 10% of New Zealand's motor vehicles. Motorcycles accounted for another 5% and even then the data is outdated, which was just the tip of the iceberg.

Firstly and most importantly: there are consistent questions of the veracity of a major number of sources and numbers dating back to 2008. This has never been addressed and is evidence it will likely never be.

The article is almost certainly largely incorrect. This is due to there not being easily available data for motor vehicle ownership for many if not most countries and much of it is in non-comparable formats. Several sources are reliant on News articles which have questions surrounding their veracity and most are completely unsourced. Almost all data provided by countries is in the form of total vehicles and not per capita or per 1000 people, which also means manual calculations are being done creating more complexities. There is then the issue that the population at the time of motor vehicle data is accurately sourced, which may involve almost as much work as retrieving motor vehicle numbers (which will not be done).

Secondly, there is an extreme difference in reporting per country; as I mentioned below in my edit in July: many of the top countries are inclusive of motorcycles and other vehicles, while countries such as Malaysia which have a total number of motor vehicles above 1 per capita, have them excluded. The title of this article is "Vehicles per capita", which also is very different than what is being reported. Achieving parity in countries that do provide numbers would often require manual calculations to remove different non-applicable vehicles (much of which data isn't available) and is not readily verifiable. Add to this the requirements for updating as new data emerges means this article is extremely likely to have misinformation even if it could be all sourced correctly today.

Thirdly, the possibility of accuracy is disputed; established countries with better reporting are more likely to have more accurate and larger numbers of vehicles that can be measured, while countries without licensing requirements or high levels of registration are likely to be heavily underinflated. This may be more accurate if the article was titled "registered motor vehicles per capita" however even that fails to address which vehicles are included.

While doing research for this article, I have seen a number of references to this article as a source that is completely inaccurate. By having this article, it is contributing to misinformation on the subject and is prohibitively difficult to ensure it is accurate at this point in time, let alone at any point in the future after the data has changed.

If anyone disagrees, I invite them to fix or make major steps towards fixing the entire article (including major methodological changes of the article to ensure accurate sourcing) before the article is deleted, however, I believe this is not realistic (having searched for many countries) and the article will continue to be edit by multiple people, using multiple methodologies and ultimately just continue to be misinformation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Buzzinowt (talk • contribs) 03:24, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

Heavily flawed

This article is heavily flawed in a number of ways, and borders on misinformation. I believe a notice should be placed on the main page until it is completely re-done.

Firstly there are a huge number of uncited vehicle numbers, I have removed a large number which pointed to citation 1 (Gibralter), including large countries such as Canada and Australia (I have updated Australia), Canada is most certainly incorrect.

Secondly, there will obviously be large differences between the way countries report vehicle numbers. This needs to be quantified better in the summary, as it currently states these numbers exclude 2 wheel vehicles, while several countries do include those numbers as it is not immediately citable to remove them. This 'favors' countries with a large number of 2 wheeled vehicles. An example of this is for New Zealand where motorcycles add 43 'vehicles per 1000', while it halves the number of vehicles in countries such as Malaysia In addition to this, there is discussion of 'vehicles on road' versus, 'registered vehicles'. There is almost certainly no way to compare these as I would assume most countries will not follow the number of vehicles on road which aren't registered etc.

Thirdly, the population of each country at the date of the cited vehicle number needs to be included in the table so that it can be cited and visible. Currently the number of vehicles per 1000 has no citation or visible calculation.  

Forthly, after a cursory look, I have found major errors is a handful of countries including the US which referenced a Yahoo article with a different number, New Zealand which had referenced a number that included 800,000 trailers which are not motor vehicles, Australia which pointed to nothing and Canada which is incorrect. Looking at another few such as Malaysia the sources are very poor.

Buzzinowt (talk) 00:44, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

References

Sources

Following the trail of the graphic available at Our World in Data[1] I found these two sources which could make it easier to find citations:

WHO source: [2]

UN ECE source: [3]

The UN statistics division has a tool to find the population of any country for a given year: [4] Wizmut (talk) 15:57, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Just as an aside, I cannot find any data for Monaco. Their official statistics bulletin only reports new registrations.[5] If anyone can find a good source on a figure, feel free to add it back to the list. Wizmut (talk) 18:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I have also remove Puerto Rico. The source that was there just had a guess of 1.5 people per car. I also found this letter from PR's statistics house complaining that they don't have enough money to collect data on vehicle registrations.[6] Wizmut (talk) 01:10, 16 October 2024 (UTC)