The forecast model did its job for forty years. Feed it trailing point-of-sale data, a bell curve of failure rates tied to mileage, and a service factor for safety stock, and it told you what to stock and where. That is not a bad model. It is the wrong model for the fleet on the road right now.
The fleet is not aging or renewing. It is doing both, at once.
The average light vehicle in the United States hit 12.6 years old in 2024, and 12.8 in 2025 - a new record, according to S&P Global Mobility. That fleet keeps buying oil filters, fuel pumps, and catalytic converters on the same old schedule. Layered on top of it is a fast-growing population of BEVs, hybrids, and software-defined vehicles that follow none of those rules. One playbook now has to serve two fleets moving in opposite directions, and neither one will forgive being planned like the other.
Electrification does not shrink demand. It relocates it.
CLEPA and Roland Berger project gross demand for traditional aftermarket components will fall 13% to 17% by 2040 against a 2019 baseline, as fewer moving combustion parts wear out on the road. That is real, and it is the easy part of the story. The harder part is that value is not disappearing; it is concentrating into a smaller set of expensive, complex systems: traction batteries, inverters, and thermal-management loops that hold battery cells inside a narrow operating band. Planners who read the decline as “less demand” and miss the concentration are stocking down exactly where the margin moved.
Tires are the counterexample worth remembering here: heavier packs and instant torque wear EV tires up to 20% faster, Michelin’s benchmarking shows, and J.D. Power found 39% of BEV owners replaced a tire within their first year of ownership, against 20% of ICE owners. Electrification does not universally reduce wear. It redistributes it, unevenly, across the vehicle.
Fewer crashes, bigger bills.
ADAS is doing what it was built to do - cutting at-fault collisions. It is not doing what planners expected, which was to shrink collision-parts spend. Collision-repair data shows BEV repairs lean disproportionately on OEM parts compared with conventional vehicles, and diagnostic scans have become a routine line on collision estimates. A cracked bumper is no longer a cosmetic repair; it is a mechatronic enclosure holding radar and cameras that must be recalibrated to spec. Total loss declarations have climbed alongside it, taking a growing share of claims. Fewer accidents, pricier ones, and a sourcing mix planners have not fully repriced. Unit demand falls while the value and the OEM share of each event rise, which means the old volume forecast can be right and the stocking plan still wrong.
The clock on circularity is not hypothetical.
Once the battery becomes the most valuable serviceable component on the vehicle, the rules written around it become planning inputs. Under the EU Battery Regulation, a mandatory Digital Battery Passport becomes enforceable on 18 February 2027 for EV, light-means-of-transport, and larger industrial batteries placed on the EU market - a legal requirement to track provenance, recycled content, and state-of-health across the component’s life. That turns aftermarket procurement into a two-directional flow: parts planning now has to account for what comes back into the system, not just what ships out.
What this changes, practically
Four shifts belong on every aftermarket planning roadmap this year:
- Stop indexing wear to mileage alone. Model it by component physics - electrification lightens engine wear and accelerates tire and thermal-system wear at the same time.
- Replan collision parts around severity, not frequency. OEM utilization, calibration load, and total-loss thresholds are the numbers that now move the budget.
- Move forecasting engines from trailing time-series to demand sensing - telematics, diagnostic trouble codes, and claims data read weeks before a purchase order does.
- Build the reverse-logistics and remanufacturing capability the regulation is about to require, before it is required.
None of this argues that history is worthless. It argues that history alone is no longer sufficient; the vehicles on the road today are writing two different stories, and a single trailing average cannot hold both. The organizations that separate those stories now, component by component, will be stocking the right part in the right place while the rest are still explaining the write-down.
Where these numbers come from is worth knowing before you build a plan on them. Any of the four shifts above start from a different baseline than yours?
Ferfier helps aftermarket and parts-planning teams replace trailing, mileage-based forecasts with demand-sensing models built on telematics, diagnostic codes, and claims data. If you want to see how your own stocking plan holds up against the fleet you actually have on the road, talk to us.
