About

This dashboard provides summary information about various trends in the U.S. automobile market. The primary data source is 74,894,001 new and 94,658,664 used vehicle listings from over 100,000 dealerships across all 50 states in the U.S. between 2018 and 2025 (inclusive). The original data are licensed from marketcheck.com and cannot be made public, but this website provides public access to various summaries of the original listings data.

The open-source project was created by Nithin Sarva and Dr. John Paul Helveston, an Associate Professor in the Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Department at The George Washington University.

This website and its content are licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. For details on the technologies and open-source tools used to build this site, see the Tech Stack page.

If you use this dashboard or its data in your work, see the Cite page for citation information.

R Data Package

The summary data powering this dashboard are available as the {vehicletrends} R package. Install it from GitHub to access all datasets directly in R:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("vehicletrends/vehicletrends")

See the package documentation site for details on available datasets.

Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT)

The Daily VMT page shows the distribution of daily VMT across all vehicles in the dataset. Each chart displays quantiles of daily mileage for a given combination of powertrain and vehicle type. For example, the 0.5 quantile represents the median daily mileage (half of vehicles drive less than this amount and half drive more).

The VMT by Age page shows median cumulative vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by vehicle age. Each chart displays the 50th quantile (median) of total mileage for a given combination of powertrain and vehicle type as vehicles age over time.

For both of the VMT pages, we estimate VMT by dividing the odometer readings (mileage) of used vehicles by their age, which gives an approximation of the VMT over time. We estimate the age of the vehicle as the listing date minus the production date, which we estimate as June 30 of the year previous to the model year (e.g., we estimate a 2020 model year vehicle was produced June 30, 2019). We summarize this quantity by taking quantiles of the observations at each age bin (in 3-month intervals). For daily VMT, we use all vehicles regardless of age and compute the VMT for every quantile from 1 to 99. For VMT by age, we only include the 25th, 50th, and 75th quantile.

Depreciation

The Depreciation page shows how vehicles retain value over time across different powertrains and vehicle types. Each chart displays the retention rate, which is the ratio of the current listing price to the original MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price). A retention rate of 1.0 means the vehicle retains 100% of its original value, while 0.5 means it has lost half its value.

We estimate the retention rate by dividing the listing price of used vehicles by the original MSRP for that make, model, and trim. Vehicle age is estimated as the listing date minus the production date, which we estimate as June 30 of the year previous to the model year (e.g., we estimate a 2020 model year vehicle was produced June 30, 2019). We summarize this quantity by taking the 25th, 50th, and 75th quantiles of the observations for each combination of powertrain and vehicle type at each age bin (in 3-month intervals). The charts display the 50th quantile (median) retention rate.

Percent of Market

The Percent of Market page shows how the composition of vehicle listings has changed over time across different market dimensions. Each chart displays the percentage of listings for a given group (e.g., powertrain, vehicle type, or price bin) broken down by a category dimension, with separate views for new and used inventory. For example, the “Powertrain by Vehicle Type” tab shows, for each powertrain, what percentage of listings fall into each vehicle type category over time. This helps reveal shifts in the market, such as the growing share of CUVs among BEV listings or changing price distributions across powertrains.

Percent of Dealers

The Percent of Dealers page shows the percentage of dealerships that have at least one vehicle of a given type in their inventory over time. While the Percent of Market page measures the share of total listings, this page measures how widely a vehicle type is distributed across dealerships. For example, a powertrain may represent a small share of total listings but still be stocked by a large share of dealers (or vice versa). Each chart displays the share of dealers carrying a specific combination of powertrain and category (vehicle type or price bin), with separate views for new and used inventory.

Market Concentration

The Market Concentration page uses the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) to measure how concentrated or competitive each powertrain segment is over time. The HHI ranges from 0 to 1, where values below 0.15 indicate a competitive market, values between 0.15 and 0.25 indicate moderate concentration, and values above 0.25 indicate a highly concentrated market. Concentration is measured across three dimensions: by make, by vehicle type, and by price bin. See the HHI Explained page for an interactive tool that illustrates how HHI relates to market share distributions.

Registrations

The Registrations page shows light-duty vehicle registration counts by state, powertrain, and year. Data are sourced from the Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC), which compiles registration data from IHS Markit. The page includes a choropleth map of the U.S. showing registration counts or market share for a selected powertrain and year, as well as a bar chart showing the trend over time for a selected state. Users can toggle between absolute registration counts and market share (the fraction of total registrations in each state attributed to a given powertrain). Clicking on a state in the map updates the bar chart to show that state’s trend.

Listing Counts

The table below summarises how many observations of vehicle listings were included in the summary data presented on this website.