The total number of registered vehicles in Korea rose to a new high last year as the number of people purchasing new vehicles also climbed to a 10-year high, the government said Friday.

The number of registered vehicles grew 2.8 percent on-year to a little more than 18.43 million, with nearly 1.6 million new cars purchased in 2011, according to the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs.

It said people writing off older cars also surged to an all-time high of some 1.1 million, up 18.4 percent from 2010.

“The number of new vehicle registrations rose 4.7 percent on-year with the number of write-offs reaching record numbers last year,” the ministry said in a press release.

“Such a large increase in the number of write-offs is partly due to the growing demand for new vehicles as the large number of cars registered during the country’s great automobile boom in the 1990s are becoming old.”

The ministry said the number of used cars being shipped overseas was also on a steady rise, further pushing up the number of vehicle write-offs here. A total of 248,275 used vehicles were exported last year, up 16.1 percent from a year earlier.

Passenger vehicles accounted for 76.7 percent of all vehicles in the country with some 14.13 million cars registered at the end of last year. There were 3.22 million cargo trucks, making up 17.5 percent of the total.

The total number of imported vehicles came to 620,799, about 3.4 percent of all registered vehicles here, with some 114,000 new imported cars registered in 2011, up 13.7 percent from a year earlier, the ministry said. 

(Yonhap News)