We take a look at the publicly available data from New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) and Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) from January to July 2019 about the number of written off vehicles that is maintained in the damaged vehicle list. Our purpose here will be to forecast the number of damaged, end of life vehicles for the remainder of year. We will try and cover some of the required work in this blog and tackle the rest in future blog posts.
The damaged vehicle list includes
- Flood-water damaged vehicles
- Fire damaged vehicles
- Written off vehicles (Declared so by the owner through a statutory declaration for what ever purpose. We will also assume that the vehicles had approached their “natural” of life cycle or were too expensive to repair.)
- Written off due to flood
- Written off due to fire damage
Here, we are interested in the last three items on the list. A quick look at the data shows that approximately 1500 vehicles were written off in the first six months of the current year. This includes 124 Toyota, 89 Subaru, 66 Nissan, 86 Mitsubishi, 27 Mercedes-benz, 279 Mazda, 103 Hundai, 250 Holden, 89 Ford vehicles. The data is restricted to vehicle makes and not further broken down in models and year.
So far so good, but to get an estimate of the rate at which vehicles die in New Zealand on a monthly and annual basis we will look at data from SNZ as a supplement. We will make use of the simple formula given below (this is rather naive, but for a very rough estimate it will have to do!)
Vehicles for our purposes means cars and trucks and we will not include other types of vehicles in our analysis, but which are included in the data from SNZ.
We will continue our discussion in the next post. For now adios!
