Courtesy of Doug Short.
Note from dshort: Following up on yesterday’s preliminary report on U.S. Light Vehicle sales, I’ve update the charts below.
For the past few years I’ve been following a couple of transportation metrics: Vehicle Miles Traveled and Gasoline Volume Sales. For both series I focus on the population adjusted data. Let’s now do something similar with the Light Vehicle Sales report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This data series stretches back to January 1976. Since that first data point, the Civilian Noninstitutional Population Age 16 and Over (i.e., driving age not in the military or an inmate) has risen 61.7%.
Here is a chart, courtesy of the FRED repository, of the raw data. This is a quite noisy series, to be sure. The latest data point is the preliminary February count published by WardsAuto.
Here is my version on the FRED chart with a couple of additions.
- I’ve added a 12-month moving average to smooth the noise and help visualize the trend.
- I’ve overlaid a linear regression (the red line) to further illustrate the long-term trend.
In the chart above, the latest moving average value is 5.7% below is record high in September 2000.
Here is the same chart with two additional modifications.
- I’ve created a per-capita version using the FRED’s CNP16OV series for the adjustment.
- I’ve indexed the numbers so that the first data point, January 1976, equals 100.
The moving-average for the per-capita series peaked in February 1979. Thirty-five-plus years later, it is now down 28.5% from that February 1979 peak month.
The good news is that this adjusted metric has continued to rise from its Great Recession historic low, and it is comfortably above the linear regression. It will be interesting to see if the post-recession growth continues in the years ahead.
