If you have noticed that the streets of your home town are filled with more cars than ever before you are not alone. The world is stuffed full of cars everywhere you go. Well, nearly everywhere at least.
These are the most up to date figures I could find for how many cars there are in each country. Some are more up to date than others but they give us a fascinating glimpse at the number of cars in the world…
The Least Cars
Where have you seen the fewest number of cars on the street? In my case, I saw very few in certain parts of Bolivia and, sure enough, it is quite low down the list with 68 per 10,000 inhabitants.
However, the joint winners with just 2 cars per 10,000 people are Togo and Sao Tome and Principe. Since the African country has a far bigger population we can safely say that Togo is the biggest country where you will find so few vehicles.
Next with 3 cars per 10,000 inhabitants are a few African countries along with Bangladesh and the Solomon Islands. India and Pakistan are surprisingly low, with 18 per 10,000 people, although I assume the figures have risen in the 3 or 4 years since those figures were taken.
The Most Cars
As I grew up in the UK’s crowded streets (not literally; I lived in a house) I expected the UK to be near the top of the list. In fact, it is in 34th place with 519 cars per 10,000 inhabitants, which is one place ahead of Ireland.
So who is the top dog? Well, the winner is San Marino with 1,263 cars per 10,000 people who live there. Having said that, with a population of only 30,000 I make that just over 3,500 vehicles in total.
Second place is the equally miniscule Monaco so the real winner is – surprise surprise – the USA. Here, there are 797 cars per 10,000 inhabitants. With a population of 315 million this means this there are 250 million vehicles there. It seems that China will soon overtake it in terms of number of cars, although the far greater population in the Asian country means that the USA will still be ahead in terms of cars per person.