Road Vehicles Australia, January 2024 - Explanatory Notes BITRE Road vehicles Australia, January 2024, includes all vehicles registered with an Australian state or territory motor vehicle registry (MVR) for unrestricted use on public roads and reported by jurisdictions to the National Exchange of Vehicle and Driver Information System (NEVDIS), on the 31 January 2024. The scope of the estimates have been defined to accord as closely as possible with the previous Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) Motor Vehicle Census (MVC) estimates and, as far as practicable, exclude: * recreational vehicles such as trail bikes, quad bikes, and sand dune buggies intended for off-road use * veteran and vintage vehicles registered for restricted use only * consular vehicles, and * vehicles registered by the defence forces. In particular, veteran and vintage vehicles registered for restricted use do not appear to be present in NEVDIS for most jurisdictions and are therefore not included. Consular and defence force vehicles also do not appear to be present in the NEVDIS data. Recreational vehicles are excluded via make and model, however, some trail bikes and quad bikes may still be present in the estimates. BITRE has followed the ABS MVC registration cut-off, deeming all vehicles whose registration lapsed up to 30 days prior to the MVC snapshot date (i.e. after 31 December of the preceding calendar year) to be in scope. Data Quality Raw motor vehicle registry data requires significant cleaning and standardisation to produce nationally-consistent estimates. Variation in registration categories used across different jurisdictions, inconsistent allocation of vehicles to registration categories within jurisdictions, and the size of the registered vehicle fleet greatly complicates the process of consistently and accurately identifying and categorising vehicles. The number of registered road vehicles (over 25 million vehicles in 2024) dictates that quality assurance of each record is not possible. For data made available at a detailed level, BITRE is unable to guarantee that it is necessarily sufficient for all purposes for which it may be used. There is also variation in vehicle registration categories and motive power codes across different state and territory MVRs and care should be taken when comparing data across jurisdictions. The data provided to and used by BITRE to produce estimates of registered road vehicles for any year may be revised or corrected in later years. BITRE will continue to refine and improve its data cleaning and standardisation processes, which may also result in estimates being revised or corrected in later years. Registered vehicle attributes Road Vehicles Australia includes the following vehicle attributes for each registered vehicle (including caravans, trailers, and registered plant and equipment): * State/territory of registration * Postcode of registration * Postcode of vehicle garaging * Vehicle type * Make-model * Year of manufacture * Fuel type * Number of cylinders * Engine capacity * Seating capacity * Tare weight * Gross vehicle mass/gross combination mass * National Heavy Vehicle charge code * Industry (ANZSIC Sub-division, for company-registered vehicles) Detailed extracts of counts of registered vehicles for selected combinations of attributes are available on data.gov.au. Statistical geography Road Vehicles, Australia data is available for the following geographical areas: * state/territory of vehicle registration * postcode of vehicle registration * postcode of vehicle garaging (i.e. vehicle garaging postcode where recorded and registered postcode where garaging postcode is not available). When analysing registered vehicle counts at postcode level, please note: * there are vehicles for which the postcode of the vehicle's owner is in a different jurisdiction to that in which the vehicle is registered. For example, the registered postcode of a vehicle could be in New South Wales, yet the vehicle is registered in Queensland; * some official postcodes (PO boxes, large volume receivers and specialist delivery postcodes) do not correspond to residential areas; and * a small proportion of registered postcodes could not be matched to official Australian postcodes (e.g. incomplete, invalid or overseas postcode). All invalid postcodes are encoded as 'UNKN' (Unknown). Confidentialisation Vehicle counts presented in the detailed data extracts have been 'confidentialised' so as mitigate the risk that third parties could identify particular individuals, families, households, dwellings or businesses, from released vehicle counts. BITRE's confidentialisation procedures involve a combination of suppressing the value of small-count cells (i.e. cells with fewer than 3 units), including any total cells, and perturbation or suppression of any secondary cells necessary to preserve confidentiality. The confidentialisation procedures applied to detailed extracts available on data.gov.au involves the random perturbation of non-zero small count cells reported in this extract, including any total cells. Perturbation may change the true cell value by either increasing or decreasing the value by a small amount. These adjustments introduce random errors, but with almost no bias. Consequently, totals produced by summing interior estimates provided in the detailed extracts may not sum to the totals reported in each extract or the totals reported in BITRE Road Vehicle Australia, January 2024 publication and summary spreadsheet. Further details For further details about these statistics please refer to: BITRE Road vehicles Australia, January 2024 (https://www.bitre.gov.au/statistics/road).