Car Ownership Statistics in Canada (2026): Vehicles & EVs

Canada’s electric-vehicle fleet grew 44.9% last year. Its share of new registrations fell from 14.6% to 8.7%. Both numbers are correct, and confusing them is the single most common error in Canadian EV coverage: one is a stock, the other a flow. A stock keeps rising for years after the flow turns down, which is exactly what is happening now that rebates have lapsed — and it is why the federal 60%-by-2030 target is further away than the fleet figures suggest. Registration data from Statistics Canada; our calculations labelled (InsuranceXpert analysis).

How many cars are there in Canada?

About 26.8 million road motor vehicles were registered in Canada in 2024 — up 4.2% from 25.7 million in 2023 (Statistics Canada). That total covers everything from passenger cars to heavy trucks; 24.6 million of them (91.6%) are light-duty vehicles, the cars, SUVs, vans and light trucks people drive day to day.

To put the fleet in human terms: with a population of 41,548,787 (StatCan, April 2025), that works out to roughly 0.65 registered vehicles per person, or close to two vehicles for every three Canadians (InsuranceXpert analysis).

Is the number of vehicles in Canada growing?

Yes — the fleet grew 4.2% in 2024, its largest annual increase in years. But the recent history has a catch that trips up most sources: Statistics Canada restated its numbers, so the raw year-over-year figures aren’t all comparable.

Year	Registered road motor vehicles	Year-over-year	Note
2020	25.7 million	—	New counting basis
2021	26.2 million	+1.9%	As published
2022	26.3 million (original)	+0.3%	Smallest rise in 20+ years, as first reported
2022	~25.8 million (restated)	—	Revised down in the 2023 release
2023	25.7 million	−0.3% (vs restated)	Post-revision
2024	26.8 million	+4.2%	Comparable to 2023

Sources: Statistics Canada, The Daily (2021–2024 releases) and Table 23-10-0308-01.

The clean, comparable story is 2023 (25.7M) → 2024 (26.8M), a 4.2% gain — helped by new-vehicle sales rising about 9.5% and by Ontario’s automatic-registration-renewal program (launched July 2024) reactivating lapsed registrations.

Why did Canada’s vehicle count appear to drop in 2023?

It didn’t really — the “drop” is a definitional change, not fewer cars. This is the single most misreported figure in Canadian vehicle data, so it’s worth explaining plainly.

Before 2023, a pandemic-era registration exemption kept expired vehicles counted as “active.” That exemption ended in February 2022, and in March 2022 Ontario eliminated licence-plate renewal fees and stickers — after which some drivers simply stopped renewing. Statistics Canada therefore revised 2022 down from about 26.3 million to roughly 25.8 million to strip out those inactive registrations. That revision is why 2023 (25.7 million) looks flat against 2022, and why anyone comparing a pre-2023 headline number to a 2024 number will get a misleading answer.

The takeaway for citing this data: compare 2023 and 2024 (both on the new basis), and treat any figure from 2022 or earlier as a different measurement. An even older “35.7 million (2019)” number that circulates online uses a still-broader vehicle definition and should never be charted against the current 25–27 million series.

Which provinces have the most registered vehicles?

Ontario alone accounts for more than a third of Canada’s light-duty vehicles. Ontario had 8.8 million registered light-duty vehicles in 2024 — 35.9% of the national LDV total (Statistics Canada). That single province holds more light vehicles than every Atlantic and Prairie province combined.

Because Statistics Canada’s 2024 release publishes only Ontario’s provincial stock in full, the cleanest province-by-province view comes from new registrations, where the ranking is unsurprising — it tracks population:

Province	New vehicle registrations, 2024
Ontario	699,289
Quebec	477,761
British Columbia	219,177

Source: Statistics Canada, Table 20-10-0025-01. Counts for some smaller provinces are withheld under data-sharing agreements.

Newfoundland & Labrador was the only province to register a decline in new vehicles in 2024. For a full ten-province stock table you’d need to pull Table 23-10-0308-01 directly — a good example of why we don’t estimate the cells Statistics Canada doesn’t publish.

What kinds of vehicles do Canadians own?

Light-duty vehicles are 91.6% of the fleet — and Canadians have decisively swapped cars for SUVs. Within the light-duty category, multi-purpose vehicles (SUVs and crossovers) are now the single biggest group.

Vehicle type	Share of light-duty fleet, 2024	Share in 2017
SUVs / crossovers (multi-purpose)	41.9%	29.8%
Passenger cars	35.0%	45.0%
Pickups, vans and other light trucks	~23%	~25%

Source: Statistics Canada, Vehicle registrations 2024.

That is a structural shift, not a blip: passenger cars fell 10 percentage points (from 45.0% to 35.0%) between 2017 and 2024 — a 22% relative decline — while SUVs/crossovers rose 12.1 points, up 41% relative (InsuranceXpert analysis). Heavier, pricier SUVs are one reason repair and replacement costs — and therefore insurance premiums — have climbed.

Beyond the light-duty category, the commercial fleet grew too: medium-duty registrations rose 4.0% and heavy-duty 0.8% in 2024, with Class 8 tractor-trailers making up 87.7% of all heavy trucks. Buses are the one shrinking segment — there were 556 fewer on the road in 2024 than in 2019, a lingering effect of pandemic-era transit and coach cuts. Under the hood, gasoline still powers 93.3% of the light-duty fleet (2023), with diesel slowly declining (−2.1%) and electrified vehicles taking the rest.

How many electric vehicles are on the road in Canada?

About 685,199 zero-emission vehicles were registered in Canada at the end of 2024 — 487,618 battery-electric (BEV) and 197,581 plug-in hybrid (PHEV) — up 44.9% in a single year. Add conventional (non-plug-in) hybrids and the “electrified” total is roughly 1.27 million vehicles, about 5.2% of all light-duty vehicles.

Fuel type	2021	2022	2023	2024
Battery-electric (BEV)	152,685	224,175	327,732	487,618
Plug-in hybrid (PHEV)	95,896	121,261	145,010	197,581
Zero-emission total	248,581	345,436	472,742	685,199
Conventional hybrid (HEV)	303,073	372,696	444,564	585,978

Source: Statistics Canada, Table 23-10-0308-01.

The zero-emission stock has more than doubled in three years. Compounded, that’s a growth rate of about 40% per year from 2021 to 2024 (InsuranceXpert analysis) — one of the fastest-growing categories of anything on Canadian roads.

Two shifts inside that number are worth pulling out. First, battery-electric vehicles are pulling away from plug-in hybrids: BEVs grew 48.8% in 2024 and now make up 71% of the zero-emission stock, up from 61% in 2021 (InsuranceXpert analysis) — buyers are increasingly skipping the plug-in-hybrid stepping stone and going fully electric. Second, even after all that growth, zero-emission vehicles were still only 2.8% of all light-duty vehicles on the road in 2024, up from 2.0% in 2023 (InsuranceXpert analysis). That gap between a ~9–15% sales share and a ~3% fleet share is the single most important thing to understand about EVs in Canada — and the subject of the methodology note below.

Source: Statistics Canada, Table 23-10-0308-01

What share of new cars in Canada are electric?

Zero-emission vehicles peaked at 14.6% of new registrations in 2024, then fell to 8.7% in 2025. The chart above tells the story: a steady climb from 2.9% in 2019 to above 10% in 2023, and then a sharp reversal.

The 2025 drop was steep — new ZEV registrations fell 34.7% — after the federal iZEV rebate and several provincial incentives were paused or cut starting January 2025, alongside economic uncertainty. It’s a clean illustration of how dependent EV demand still is on subsidies: pull the rebate, and the share can fall by a third in a year.

Source: Statistics Canada (Table 20-10-0025-01) & Canada Energy Regulator. 2030 is the federal ZEV sales target — the 2026 target was paused in Sept 2025.

Which provinces have the most electric vehicles?

British Columbia and Quebec dominate EV adoption, running at roughly double the national rate. In 2023, both provinces saw about 20% of new registrations go zero-emission, and BC, Quebec and Ontario together made up about 92% of all new ZEV registrations in the country. On a stock basis — the share of vehicles already on the road that are zero-emission — BC leads at 3.8% and Quebec at 3.5%, versus a national average of 2.0% (2023). Strong provincial rebates and, in BC and Quebec, provincial sales mandates explain most of the gap.

Will Canada meet its 2030 electric-vehicle target?

Almost certainly not on current trends. Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard set regulated targets for new light-duty sales: 20% zero-emission by 2026, 60% by 2030, and 100% by 2035.

But the numbers don’t line up with the trajectory. The 2025 zero-emission share was 8.7%. Reaching 60% by 2030 would require it to grow roughly seven-fold in five years — a sustained pace of about 47% a year (InsuranceXpert analysis) — at the very moment the trend went into reverse.

Federal ZEV sales target	Year	Status
20% of new light-duty sales	2026	Paused (Sept 2025, under 60-day review)
60% of new light-duty sales	2030	May be amended
100% of new light-duty sales	2035	May be amended

Source: Government of Canada; pause confirmed via CBC/McMillan LLP, Sept 2025.

Recognising the gap, the government paused the 2026 target in September 2025 and signalled the later ones may change; it now frames roughly 75% EV adoption by 2035 as a more realistic expectation. Provincial mandates in Quebec and BC, however, remain in force.

How many licensed drivers are there in Canada?

There’s no clean national figure — and that’s an honest limitation worth stating. Driver licensing is handled province by province, so Canada publishes no single authoritative count of licensed drivers. The firmest provincial anchor is Ontario, with 11,164,837 licensed drivers as of March 2022 (74.7% of its population). Estimates of a national total (often quoted around 26–28 million) can’t be tied to one federal source, so we don’t publish one as fact.

The same caution applies to two figures you’ll see elsewhere: vehicles per household isn’t published on the registration table, and the most recent Statistics Canada figure for average vehicle age is 9.66 years (2016) — newer “average age” numbers come from commercial estimates (which put it above 10 years) and should be cited as such, not stated as official.

Why do vehicle-ownership figures disagree?

Different sources give different answers, for reasons worth understanding before trusting any single number:

• Series revisions. The 2022 restatement (down ~0.5 million) means pre-2023 and post-2023 totals aren’t directly comparable. Always check which basis a figure uses.
• Definitions of “vehicle.” Older releases used a broader universe (hence the “35.7 million (2019)” figure). Road motor vehicles, light-duty vehicles and “all registered vehicles” are three different denominators.
• “EV” vs “ZEV.” Statistics Canada’s “electric” bucket includes conventional hybrids; “zero-emission” (ZEV) means battery-electric and plug-in hybrid only. A page quoting “1.27 million EVs” and one quoting “685,000 ZEVs” can both be right.
• Stock vs flow. “Share of vehicles on the road” (stock, ~2%) is very different from “share of new registrations” (flow, ~9–15%). EVs look small as a stock and large as a flow because the fleet turns over slowly.
• Province vs country. Licensing and some registration details are provincial, so national totals are assembled from provincial data with different timing.

Explaining these gaps is the whole point: the number isn’t wrong, it just needs a label.

Related statistics

• Car sales statistics in Canada
• Car accident statistics in Canada
• Car insurance statistics in Canada
• Biggest car insurance companies in Canada

Using these statistics

You’re welcome to cite these figures in articles, research or presentations. Please reference the original source (Statistics Canada, Canada Energy Regulator or the Government of Canada as noted); figures labelled “InsuranceXpert analysis” are our own calculations derived from those sources, and a link back to this page is appreciated.