One in four passenger cars on Israeli roads is under three years old. The segment plays by its own rules: a different drivetrain, different equipment, different brands — and a disproportionately large share of the driving.
A recurring snapshot of the new segment of the Israeli passenger fleet — cars no older than three to four years. For people choosing a car who want to see the whole market; for journalists and analysts who need verifiable numbers rather than estimates; and for the simply curious. Every figure is recomputed by a full pass over the open vehicle registry — 4,009,833 records, no sampling, no extrapolation.
Age is counted by the date a car first entered the road — calendar cohorts, not model year.
| Age band | Cars | Fleet share | Rechargeable | Rechargeable share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under 3 (on road 2023+) | 1,068,725 | 26.7% | 327,297 | 30.6% |
| under 4 (on road 2022+) | 1,321,418 | 33.0% | 369,045 | 27.9% |
| 5–9 years (2017–2021) | 1,187,139 | 29.6% | 39,277 | 3.3% |
| 10+ years (2016 and earlier) | 1,501,276 | 37.4% | 291 | 0.0% |
| All passenger cars | 4,009,833 | 100.0% | 408,613 | 10.2% |
Fleet renewal and fleet electrification are effectively the same event. The gap between new cars and the rest is elevenfold.
| Year | Total | BEV | PHEV | ICE | Rechargeable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 incomplete | 256,218 | 32,534 | 64,557 | 159,127 | 37.9% |
| 2025 | 289,815 | 57,883 | 34,758 | 197,174 | 32.0% |
| 2024 | 264,299 | 67,395 | 6710 | 190,194 | 28.0% |
| 2023 | 258,393 | 47,323 | 16,137 | 194,933 | 24.6% |
| 2022 | 252,693 | 26,700 | 15,048 | 210,945 | 16.5% |
| 2021 | 272,151 | 10,510 | 12,845 | 248,796 | 8.6% |
| 2020 | 200,008 | 1405 | 5232 | 193,371 | 3.3% |
| 2019 | 232,248 | 541 | 3698 | 228,009 | 1.8% |
Here and everywhere on this site the figures cover passenger cars only. The summary report counts the same shares together with commercial vehicles and lands about a point lower: only around 7% of commercial vehicles are plug-in, and they pull the overall share down.
Every model is assigned a safety-equipment level from 1 to 8: automatic braking, lane keeping, blind-spot monitoring. In four years the top levels went from rarity to the norm.
Chinese brands took 28.9% of the new-car segment, and 79.1% of their deliveries are rechargeable.
New cars drive markedly more than old ones, so their weight in road traffic exceeds their share of the fleet.
The difference carries over to the whole fleet: the share of kilometres diverges from the share of cars by nine points.
The roads have become much safer by the count of accidents — but not by their severity.
Involvement has fallen for seventeen straight years: from 12.8 to 3.1 accidents per thousand vehicles, 4.1×, while the fleet roughly doubled. Today that is one casualty accident per 256 passenger cars a year. The 2025 point is computed by the CBS method: 13,646 vehicles involved (CBS quarterly 3/2026, final data) over a fleet of about 4.35 million — the CBS will publish its own figure in the annual review.
Per CBS data for 2022 — the newest with a breakdown by vehicle age — old cars are over-represented specifically in fatal accidents: 10 years and over hold 33.2% of the fleet, 34.4% of all accident participants and 38.4% of fatal ones. Cars under three hold 25.7% of the fleet, 26.0% of accidents and 28.4% of fatal ones, but they drive 19.6 thousand km a year against 11.9 for old cars: per kilometre a young car is markedly safer. The middle, 4–9 years, holds 41.1% of the fleet and only 33.2% of fatal accidents.
Top block — all injury accidents, bottom — fatal ones. A type button shows that type alone across all years; “All” brings back the full picture. Hover or tap a bar for the count, share and year total. 2025 and the first half of 2026 come from the CBS quarterly: the 2025 microdata is not published yet (2024 came out in February 2026), so fatal accidents by type stop at 2024 for now — 2025 is expected in early 2027.
This counts vehicles, not accidents: a car-and-motorcycle crash is counted in both. Passenger cars include taxis; heavy — trucks of all classes, buses and minibuses. Since issue 3/2026 CBS reports e-bikes and e-scooters separately from "other"; they are now in the bicycles-and-scooters group for all years.
This shows what the market is doing right now. It counts by road-entry date rather than sale date — a registry field that refreshes daily. The current month therefore appears from its first day, while official monthly statistics arrive in a batch only after the month closes.
The current month carries an asterisk and is drawn paler: it has not finished, so its bar cannot be compared with the others. The summer dip is ordinary seasonality of the Israeli market.
Everything above on this page is passenger cars. Trucks and buses sit in a separate registry and are not part of those figures; heavy pickups and tractors from the same registry appear in the table for reference, trailers are not shown. They must not be added together, but the pace is worth comparing.
Buses in blue, trucks (heavy pickups excluded) in green. Rechargeable cars are 10.2% of the passenger fleet; among new 2026 buses 21.9% are electric, among trucks 2.7%.
| Category | Total | Diesel | Petrol | Electric | Hydrogen |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trucks | 123,563 | 122,187 | 871 | 388 (0.3%) | 3 |
| Buses | 43,247 | 37,218 | 1003 | 3613 (8.4%) | 1 |
| Trucks and buses | 166,810 | 159,405 | 1874 | 4001 (2.4%) | 4 |
| Pickups above 3.5 t (for reference) | 26,018 | 19,726 | 340 | 5916 (22.7%) | — |
| Tractors (for reference) | 64,716 | 27,353 | 37,087 | 254 (0.4%) | — |
| All categories | 257,544 | 206,484 | 39,301 | 10,171 (3.9%) | 4 |
Hydrogen vehicles in the registry: 4 — trucks 3, buses 1. The ministry files fuel-cell vehicles as “electric”, so the report picks them out by model and engine code and leaves them out of the electric count. The trucks are Hyundai XCIENT Fuel Cell, on the road since June 2023 and working in the north. The bus is an Allenbus FSQ6123 FCEV (Audace 1050), registered in February 2026; on 8 October 2026 it was handed to the Bazan group as Israel’s first intercity hydrogen bus: 53 seats, four 700-bar hydrogen tanks, refuelling in 5 to 12 minutes, a range of up to 600 km and only water from the exhaust. The Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure backed the project (NIS 2.5 million); the bus will carry Bazan refinery staff between Nahariya and the plant. The country still has one hydrogen station — at the Yagur junction (since 2023).
| Make | Model | Category | On the road since | Vehicles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyundai | XCIENT | Trucks | 06.2023 | 3 |
| Allenbus | FSQ6123FCEVZA | Buses | 02.2026 | 1 |
Data: external research — raw material use and life-cycle emissions, world statistics on gas flaring, the Israeli generation mix; fleet and mileage shares come from the registry. The full source list with figures is in About
Building an electric car emits roughly forty percent more than building an ordinary car outright. Lithium is evaporated from underground brines in Chile’s Atacama, the driest desert on the planet, where water is already scarce. Cobalt comes from Congo, and some of it is dug in mines where children work. That is not an invention of critics. It is true, and pretending otherwise is not an option.
An average electric car battery holds about 160 kilograms of metals. Recycling returns most of them, and roughly thirty kilograms are lost for good: 1.8 kg of lithium, 1.4 kg of nickel and 400 grams of cobalt. That is the size of a football. A petrol car burns seventeen thousand litres of fuel over its life. Stack those barrels on top of one another and you get a ninety-metre tower, a twenty-five storey building. That fuel comes back from nowhere: it goes into the air and stays there.
When people say the battery is dirty, oil enters the story already refined, as petrol at the pump. Between the well and the pump stands an entire industry, and its footprint never makes it into the comparison. During extraction the associated gas often has nowhere to go, so it is burned in flares. Nine countries account for three quarters of all flaring while producing less than half of the world’s oil. In Nigeria flaring rose twelve percent in 2024 alone, and people in the Niger Delta have lived under those flames for decades.
There is no petrol in the well. Crude is distilled, cracked and cleaned, and that takes roughly one barrel in ten: a refinery burns its own gas and coke for about half its energy, gets a third from natural gas, and the rest from electricity and steam. That price is paid on every litre, for the life of the car. A battery costs energy too: the cells for a 60 kWh pack take on the order of three megawatt-hours — electrode drying, dry rooms, formation — plus the smelting of lithium, nickel and cobalt. But that energy is paid once, and the cleaner the factory grid, the smaller the footprint: a pack built on a Nordic or European grid is roughly half as dirty as one built on coal. Of all the oil pumped worldwide, a little under half is burned in engines on the road and another thirteen percent or so in aircraft and ships; plastics, fibres, asphalt and lubricants take about one barrel in six — the only share that is growing. The remaining quarter is not “other” but quite specific things: cooking gas and heating oil in homes (about 7%), industrial furnaces and machinery (6%), the refineries’ own fuel and the energy of extraction (6%), fuel-oil power plants and backup generators (4%), tractors, pumps and fishing boats (3%).
ICCT’s July 2025 analysis puts a European electric car at 63 grams of CO₂ per kilometre over its full life cycle against 235 for a petrol one — 73% less. The extra emissions from making the battery are repaid in about seventeen thousand kilometres: a year, eighteen months of ordinary driving. Everything after that is net gain. Even in Poland, whose grid runs on coal, the advantage holds at around twenty-two percent.
Coal plays a small part in our generation: 10% in 2025, half of what it was a year earlier. The backbone is natural gas at about 73%, and gas is roughly twice as clean as coal per kilowatt-hour. Renewables ended 2025 at about 17% (Energy Ministry estimate) against 49% across Europe. Better than average on one measure, worse on the other, and the payback lands in the same range — a year, not a decade. It will keep shrinking: the Hadera coal plant runs until 2029 and solar generation is growing.
Carbon dioxide spreads evenly across the planet and does not care where it was released. The exhaust of a petrol engine — nitrogen oxides, fine particles, products of incomplete combustion — goes into the lungs of a person standing on the pavement two metres from the tailpipe. Here our own data speaks louder than any forecast.
1,068,725 passenger cars are under three years old (26.7% of the fleet), 1,321,418 under four (33.0%). Annual cohorts have held at 255–290 thousand cars for the past five years.
Among cars under 3, 30.6% are rechargeable; among all the rest — 2.8%. An elevenfold gap: in the Israeli fleet newness and a plug-in drivetrain are practically the same attribute.
In the current cohort PHEVs number 64,557 against 32,534 BEVs. Two years earlier the picture was mirrored: 67,395 BEVs vs 6710 PHEVs. Inside the rechargeable segment the type changed, not the total.
The share of top equipment levels (7–8) is 53.2% in the 2026 cohort against 2.1% in 2022. In four years a rare option became the segment standard.
Cars under 4 are 33.0% of the fleet but 41.5% of annual mileage: 25.1 bn km out of 60.5 bn. One such car covers 19,000 km a year against 11,900 km for a car over ten — 1.60 times more.
Involvement dropped from 12.8 to 3.1 per thousand vehicles over seventeen years — one casualty accident per 256 passenger cars today. Yet fatal accidents rose: 338 in 2023 vs 438 in 2025, with 459 killed — a nineteen-year record.
Per CBS data for 2022, cars aged 10+ held 33.2% of the fleet but accounted for 38.4% of fatal accidents; cars under three held 25.7% of the fleet and 28.4% of fatal accidents while driving over one and a half times as far. The CBS has published no newer vehicle-age table; the 2020 picture is the same.
28.9% of cars under 3 are Chinese brands, and 79.1% of their deliveries are rechargeable. Four such brands sit in the top ten, and BYD and Geely deliver rechargeable cars exclusively.
In 2026 21.9% of new buses are electric, while trucks — heavy pickups aside — reach only 2.7%. Pickups such as the Silverado EV and Sierra EV are a story of their own: 77.1% of their 2026 deliveries are electric, but at 4.5–5 t gross weight they are filed as N2 trucks while being private vehicles in substance. Passenger cars reach 30.6% rechargeable in the freshest cohort and 10.2% across the whole fleet. Electric trucks and buses on the road number 4001 against hundreds of thousands of cars, yet they weigh differently: one city bus covers in a year what a dozen private cars do, idling in traffic in the middle of residential streets.
Building an electric car emits about forty percent more, and almost all of it is the battery: lithium from Atacama, cobalt from Congo. Over its life the car repays that debt in roughly seventeen thousand kilometres, while a petrol car burns seventeen thousand litres of fuel — a twenty-five storey stack of barrels that comes back from nowhere. After recycling, about thirty kilograms of metal are lost from the battery, the size of a football. The gap by weight is three to four hundred times.