Home of the autobahn losing car buyers "The average age of a car registered in Germany is eight years, the highest since the Association of German Automakers began statistics." Innovation failure You do not have to be a member of some automobile lobby to argue that this trend may be taken as a rough indication of overall societal stagnation. It would be a different matter if Germans were beginning to zip around in hyper-modern, cheap aircraft which would be making cars redundant. Obviously, that's not what's happening.