Contents

• Foreword
• ARN's vision
• ARN's profile and organization
• Recycling
• ARN Recycling
  • Events in 2009
  • Outlook for 2010
• Chain management
• ARN Auto Recycling
  • Efficiency measures in the chain
  • Growing market share
  • Outlook for 2010
• ARN Recycling Services
  • Events in 2009
  • Outlook for 2010
• Knowledge sharing
• ARN Advisory
  • Market trends
  • Events in 2009
  • Outlook for 2010
• Trends in vehicle numbers
• Legislation and environmental performance
  • Legislation and regulations in the Netherlands
  • Legislation and regulations in Europe
  • 2009 environmental performance
• Appendices
  • Financial report 2009
  • Notes to the financial report 2009
  • Assurance report
  • ARN Management Plan

Trends in vehicle numbers

The impact
of the economic
crisis

Trends in vehicle numbers are crucial to ARN’s policy. All income from waste disposal fees and expenditure on recycling can be deduced directly from trends in vehicle numbers.

The overall number of vehicles depends on sales of new vehicles and parallel imports, and on the dismantling and exporting of vehicles. ARN’s recycling responsibility covers cars and light commercial vehicles with four or more wheels and a gross vehicle weight (GVW) not exceeding 3,500 kg. The figures quoted in this report relate solely to this group of vehicles.

Vehicle numbers

The number of vehicles on Dutch roads hardly increased in 2009. At the beginning of 2010 the Netherlands will have 8.7 million vehicles, namely 7.8 million cars and 0.95 million light commercial vehicles. The average age of all vehicles increased from 8.4 years in 2008 to 8.6 years in 2009.
The number of old-timers has been increasing steadily every year, including in 2009. ARN expects this number to stabilize, due in part to changed legislation relating to old-timers (i.e. it will become more expensive to drive an old-timer).

Registrations of new cars

In 2009 the number of new registrations per month was consistently below that of previous years. This is directly attributable to the financial crisis. The annual figures naturally paint the same picture:
583,697 vehicles in 2008 and 439,631 in 2009 (a drop of nearly 22%). Parallel imports fell at the end of 2008, but started to recover in mid 2009. Sales of new vehicles during the year as a whole were far lower than in previous years.

Number of deregistered vehicles

In 2009 493,129 vehicles were deregistered. Of these, 263,572 were deregistered as end-of-life vehicles and 229,557 were exported.

Dismantling

The number of end-of-life vehicles in 2006 was 25% higher than in 2008. A substantial part of this rise was due to the introduction of the national scrappage scheme. It can be seen in the figure above that there was a clear jump in the number of end-of-life vehicles immediately after the launch of the national scrappage scheme. This scheme led to vehicles being withdrawn at an increased rate. As a consequence the average age of end-of-life vehicles has decreased from 16.6 years in 2008 to 16.4 years in 2009. An important indicator for the number of end-of-life vehicles is the sale of new vehicles 15–16 years ago: such sales were high around 1993, and this is reflected in the large number of vehicles in this age group.
ARN processed 228,783 end-of-life vehicles. This represents an increase in ARN’s market share from 85% in 2008 to 87.5% in 2009.
Private scrappage was lower than in 2008. The number of dismantling companies with which ARN cooperated dropped from 252 in 2008 to 248 in 2009. Between them these companies have a growing market share, so therefore on average there are more vehicles being dismantled per company.

Export

In 2009, 229,557 second-hand vehicles were exported from the Netherlands, a drop of 11.5% compared with 2008. In 2009, more vehicles were dismantled than exported for the first time since 2005. There is still a demand for Dutch vehicles in Eastern European countries. The average age of the exported vehicles remained the same as in previous years, namely at around eleven years.