Canberra now has the youngest car fleet in the country - and the major contributing factor was a single weather event.
The latest ABS data reveals the average age of Canberra's vehicles is 9.4 years, a year younger than the national average.
The massive January 2020 hailstorm which rolled through car yards in Belconnen, across the Acton Peninsula, Barton and Fyshwick, pounding jampacked car parks and punching out laminated glass as it rushed south, damaged 44,700 vehicles in just 15 minutes according to government data.
It was the most significant and damaging hailstorm to hit the territory since 1999.
The event spawned the arrival of an insurer-driven, fast-track vehicle repair operation of the size most Canberrans had never before seen, as well as tens of thousands of written-off cars, windows smashed and panels battered, parked on grass to the north and south of the city, waiting their turn at the auction house.
The multimillion-dollar insurance payout which followed created a spike in Canberra's new vehicle sales which lasted almost nine months.
During the lengthy Covid-wrought period last year in which car sales nationally went into freefall, ACT's sales numbers bounced to near-record levels and had car carriers plying the highways day and night, trucking out the damaged vehicles and bringing replacements to the local showrooms.
The latest data shows there are 318,408 registered vehicles now on Canberra's roads, up by 7100 on the same time last year.
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