When will a consumer consider buying another car?

In the consumer buying process, purchase timing is of utmost importance. For automotive manufacturers, it is critical to be able to predict when a customer will come back to marketplace to purchase another vehicle. Such knowledge can result in significant savings in marketing campaigns expenditures. In the automotive market, there is only limited information available about customers at the time of their past purchases, due to large interpurchase time intervals. Such scarcity of information makes predicting purchase timing difficult. We are describing an approach for estimating the purchase timing of a household, based on survival analysis techniques, when given only limited information about household's past automotive purchases.