The cars that don't leave

1 Fleet age

The convoy keeps aging even as new cars arrive

From 2008 to 2025, the share of cars over 10 years old rose from 45% to 80% of the whole registered fleet. Not because fewer new cars are being bought — the total fleet grew 16% between 2020 and 2024 alone — but because for every new car, three more get registered second-hand, and those are already old when they cross the border.

Without JavaScript: the table below shows the same evolution, year by year, across the four age bands INS publishes.

Age structure of registered passenger cars in Romania, 2008 vs. 2025 (% of fleet, INS TJX0923)

Age band	2008	2025
Up to 2 years	15.4%	3.4%
2–5 years	18.3%	4.9%
5–10 years	21.1%	11.3%
Over 10 years	45.2%	80.3%

Since 2018, INS has split the "over 10 years" band into "10–20 years" and "over 20 years": in 2025, that 80.3% splits into 41.2% (10–20 years) and 39.1% (over 20 years) — nearly four in ten cars on the road have passed legal adulthood.

The European comparison tells the same story from another angle. At the end of 2024, ACEA put Romania's average fleet age at 15.6 years, three years above the EU average of 12.7; a year later, the 2Celsius Association — applying its own methodology to the same registration data — ranked Romania second in the EU, at 16.5 years. The gap between the two figures is a matter of method, not a sudden shift in the fleet: both sources point to the same fact, that Romania drives, literally, one of the oldest car fleets in the bloc.

2 The map and the gap

Why the flow doesn't stop

The flow runs strictly west to east, inside the same single market: a car taken off the road in Germany or France doesn't disappear — it usually ends up in Romania or Bulgaria. Research cited by the 2Celsius Association shows cars exported this way emit, in real driving, 53% more nitrogen oxide (NOx) and use at least 9% more fuel than the cars they replace, while 83% of exported diesels would fail Euro 6's CO₂ standard. The emissions aren't "externalized" globally — they're relocated into our own yard.

The air breathed by the cities with the oldest fleet

Car traffic isn't the only source of fine particulate matter — residential heating and construction sites contribute too — but it's a constant one, at street level, where people actually breathe. At all 42 urban background stations INS monitors, the latest available annual PM2.5 average exceeds the World Health Organization's 5 µg/m³ guideline; the average across all 42 is 13.8 µg/m³, nearly triple.

Without JavaScript: the most polluted stations in the latest available year were Sighetu Marmației (23.7 µg/m³), Galați (21.2), Codlea (20.8), Bistrița (18.7) and Sfântu Gheorghe (17.4) — all more than three times the WHO threshold.

Diesel has become the majority fuel

In 2020, petrol and diesel had roughly equal shares of the passenger-car fleet. By 2025, diesel reached 50.7% of the fleet (4.45 million cars), clearly overtaking petrol (43.0%) — a 22% rise in the number of diesel cars between 2020 and 2024 alone, in the middle of Europe's own conversation about phasing diesel out. Over the same span, electric cars grew more than eightfold, but stay under 1% of the fleet: 61,453 of them, against 4.45 million diesels.

Without JavaScript: in 2025, the passenger-car fleet broke down by pollution standard as follows — Non-Euro through Euro 2: 15.9%; Euro 3: 13.6%; Euro 4: 32.1%; Euro 5: 16.5%; Euro 6: 21.2%; electric: 0.7%. The Euro 6 segment has grown steadily since 2020, but roughly as many cars from the dirtiest categories (Non-Euro through Euro 2) are still on the road — nearly 1.4 million in 2025.

"Romania's rural and peri-urban population has no access to affordable public transport, and this situation remains largely unaddressed by central and local authorities."— 2Celsius Association, "Solutions to the problem of polluting second-hand car imports in Romania," 2026

That sentence is what links the map to the convoy: where there's no bus, an old, cheap car isn't a whim — it's the only option. The Dieselgate scandal — uncovered in 2015, when it emerged that some diesel engines' software cheated emissions tests — has left Romanian car owners with an estimated €1.4 billion in extra fuel costs since 2000, according to Transport & Environment research cited by 2Celsius. Neither the scandal nor the bill has stopped the flow of diesel cars from the West.