Events

The CARS Project team are running a series of events in 2026 and 2027.

Webinar 1: The life and times of British cars: Insights from a new data product derived from DVLA/DVSA information

Monday 23 November 2026, 10.00-12.00 GMT

The CARS project, Connecting Administrative Vehicle Data for Research on Sustainable Transport, is holding its first stakeholder webinar on Monday 23rd November 2026. CARS has combined, cleaned, and processed multiple datasets from the DfT, DVLA, and DVSA to produce the most comprehensive open overview of vehicle data across the UK from 2005 to 2025.

Currently, the UK does not publish spatially disaggregate vehicle usage statistics even though this is essential information for transport policy and planning. Further, the vehicle usage data released under Open Government Licence (OGL) cannot be easily used by researchers, analysts and policy makers, due to processing complexities and the sheer size of the data sets. To make this open data more accessible and useable, CARS has brought together three previously fragmented OGL datasets: the DVSA bulk MOT testing API, the anonymous release of MOT tests, and the DVLA Vehicle Enquiry Service API. By bringing together these datasets and undertaking extensive data cleaning, linkage and quality assurance, the project has created an array of accessible data products. These data products will help to enable more in-depth analyses of vehicle ownership, mileage, fleet composition, vehicle turnover, transport inequality and progress towards net zero goals.

Our first stakeholder webinar will introduce the CARS project; the data resources being developed and their potential applications. Attendees from academia, government and industry will hear about the origins of the project, the data sources and processing methods used to create the linked dataset, and the planned family of vehicle-level and geographically aggregated data outputs. Participants will be invited to provide feedback on the proposed data products, including potential use cases, requests for specific data extracts or samples, and the value of providing data at finer spatial resolutions.

Webinar 2: The life and times of British cars: Under the bonnet

Tuesday 26 January 2027

In this webinar, we will describe the algorithms to process data and the database architecture built to implement the data processing.

Further details to follow.