Japan Household Car Ownership Continues Decline
By wchung | 05 Apr, 2026

The number of cars owned by Japan’s households declined for the fifth straight year to an average of 1.076 motor vehicles as of the end of March, down 0.004 from a year earlier, according to the Automobile Inspection & Registration Information Association.

Japan’s households owned 57.89 million cars as of the end of March, up 0.4 percent from a year earlier. The number of households increased faster than the number of cars since 2007, causing a slide in the average number of motor vehicles per household.

The figure includes minivehicles and omits data from households in 22 quake- and tsunami-devasted cities in the prefectures of Iwata, Miyagi and Fukushima. Many tens of thousands of vehicles were destroyed or washed away but the Association used car ownership data from March 2010 for the three prefectures.