My very curious 6 year old wants to know how many cars have ever been
built -- any make and model -- from the first motorized car until some
recent date. As accurate as possible an answer would be nice.

Hi Puzzlemaster!

According to historian Rudi Volti, over one billion cars were produced
worldwide in the twentieth century.

Source:
History 600: Advanced Seminar in History Global Car Cultures
Fall 2004 
Instructor: R. J. Koshar
http://history.wisc.edu/Courses/600-Seminars/History600%2015.pdf



?The car and the system of automobility are the best exemplification
of the development of a putative globalisation. One billion cars have
been manufactured in this century. There are currently over 500m cars
world-wide, a figure expected to double by 2015 (Shove 1998).?

Sources:

Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
http://www.tcd.ie/erc/cars/reportspdf/RPWP23A.pdf

Department of Sociology at Lancaster University:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/urry-inhabiting-the-car.pdf



According to David Eisenhaure, SatCon's President and Chief Executive
Officer, some 60 million cars are produced each year worldwide.
http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.011200/200121150.htm


Since about one billion cars have been manufactured in the twentieth
century, you would have to add roughly 180 million additional cars to
that figure.


Search criteria:
"* billion cars have been *?


I hope this information satisfies your son?s curiosity!


Best regards,
Bobbie7

I've tried contacting some of the authors of those papers to get a
better estimate ('over a billion' could be 3 billion, or a trillion,
after all) or even pointers to some of their sources, but haven't
received a reply from any of them yet. After all, if there are 500
million cars on the road *now*, and the average length of time a car
is used is around 10 (or is it 7?) years, meaning a half billion cars
were built on the last 10 years, you'd think there would have been a
lot more than just one billion cars. Thanks for giving me at least a
few leads, though.