Jeffrey Liaw
President and Chief Executive Officer North America at Copart
Thanks, John and good morning, everyone and thanks for joining us for a review of our fourth quarter and fiscal 2021. We're pleased with the results for the year, another record-setting quarter on multiple dimensions. We look forward to discussing some of the underlying factors in the business with you as well. The big news of course since we last spoke with you in May has been the emergence of the delta variant of COVID-19. Nevertheless, we've seen ongoing recovery across the industry, including key measures such as vehicle miles traveled published by the Department of Transportation, gasoline consumption and the like.
So, we're beginning to see the return to normal driving activity, accident volumes, etc., though we noted still likely down on an apples-to-apples basis versus two years ago. Given the growth in our business, nonetheless, our inventory levels we'll talk about in a bit, are up meaningfully year-over-year and up double digits versus July 2019 as well and due to several drivers we'll discuss later on the call as well our average selling prices. The values we generate for our customers remain elevated and are in fact at all time highs.
Before we dig in, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the Copart cap team, which has had an active and productive few weeks certainly. As many have projected over the years, we are seeing more severe weather events with each passing year and just recently have observed flooding and other severe weather in Germany, in Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and now of course Hurricane Ida in the Northeastern United States. We're watching all of those affected in those communities, including our employees, our own team members, the very best and a speedy recovery. Hundreds of us, myself included, were in the Northeast over the weekend and we have still more Copart team members headed their leading the charge from here forward.
We'll discuss the financial implications of these events -- of these recent weather events in future quarters, but the first order of business is always is to serve our customers and to take care of our own people. I wanted to start with a couple of statistics that we provide every quarter and close with a handful of remarks about the future as well. Our global unit sales for the quarter increased 25% year-over-year with the U.S. increase of 26% and an international increase of 18.5% year-over-year.
We continue to see more aggressive COVID-19 measures in many of our international markets than we have here in the U.S., which has caused more of a volume reduction or less volume growth in those markets. Within the U.S., our insurance business grew significantly year-over-year versus the fourth quarter of 2020. That is the net effect of lower driving activity -- well increased driving activity year-over-year, still slightly lower driving activity, but on a two-year basis, we had increase in claims frequency and increase in total loss frequency as well.
Our non-insurance business, which we talk about each quarter, includes dealer consignments, wholesales and charities business, our Copart direct business in which we buy cars from consumers and institutional volume as well. We've historically provided the unit growth, in particular, excluding wholesalers and charities and on that basis, our U.S. non-insurance business grew 17% year-over-year, including a solid growth for our dealer consignment business despite inventory shortages of course throughout the automotive industry.
Our strong used car prices or used vehicle prices are driving strong returns and therefore consignment growth across these non-insurance categories. Our global inventory at the end of July increased 21.7% compared to a year ago and double-digit growth on a two-year basis as well. That's comprised of a year-over-year increase of 28% for U.S. inventory and a decline of 13% for international inventory, attributable to the COVID-19 measures I've described a few moments ago.
We are especially proud of the record average selling prices that we're delivering for our customers. The ASP strength is a reflection in part of course of market dynamics for used vehicles, but it's also a byproduct of our member recruitment and retention efforts. ASPs worldwide grew 20.7% for the quarter with U.S. ASPs of 20.6%. The question we often get is how much of that is attributable to mix shift and it's not. So our insurance ASPs are up, comparable levels are even up more still than that.
While growth in used car prices have, of course, contributed to our ASP growth, our selling prices throughout the pandemic and prior to it as well, has generally grown at a rate in excess of that of used car prices as well that being a reflection of the marketing member recruitment efforts I mentioned a moment ago. The Manheim Index, which is one of those third-party indices we do track is at 194.5 for the month of August, an increase of 18.8% year-over-year. We track other indices as well, which would provide similar directional guidance.
Our average selling prices are certainly the ultimate output metric for auction liquidity, but the underlying figures that support that notion -- the notion of the flywheel effect certainly continue as well. In the fourth quarter, we noted more bids per unit, more domestic bids per unit, more international bids per unit, all compared to a year ago, our auction liquidity is stronger than it has ever been.
The natural questions of course will continue to be about what happens after the pandemic -- dread of the pandemic goes away. I think we certainly hold an appropriate level of humility given the once in a lifetime nature of the event and our comments will largely be U.S. centric, but I think it's worth we begin some of these longer-term assumptions we've talked about on prior calls and how they've been affected by the pandemic. Driving activity certainly is rebounding by the measures we have seen, gasoline consumption and vehicle miles traveled, but not yet back to 2019 levels. We continue to believe that longer-term mobility will continue to grow that miles per person in the U.S., but certainly in our emerging markets in many of the countries that are buying our highest value vehicles will grow significantly.
We saw accident and claims frequency decline somewhat during the pandemic, but it actually increased relative to miles driven, that is a new learning for us in the pandemic to see. I think the historical conventional wisdom has always been that if there are fewer vehicle miles traveled that accident frequency per miles traveled will decrease, but in effect or in actual practice, we've seen arguably more distracted driving certainly higher speed driving and therefore accident frequency can in some respects be inversely related to vehicle miles traveled, accident frequency per miles driven.
On total loss frequency, the most important driver of our business long term that we talked about at length in the past, we've seen that increase during the pandemic as well and I wanted to offer one addendum to that in a moment. On the durability of ASPs, we note the longer-term trends in favor of ASPs. We continue to see increasing demand from emerging economies for the wrecked vehicles from the U.S., U.K., Canada, other mature economies. These emerging economies are especially eager to purchase our vehicles, which are wrecked and total vehicles become their drivable fleet. That trend has been a 30, 40-year trend and we think will be so for the foreseeable future.
I wanted to know one important consideration that I think can be easily overlooked. The natural questions are about when if the selling prices -- when the selling prices could face weakness in light of an eventual recovery in semiconductors and new cars and the like. What I think is sometimes misunderstood that all else equal, high ACVs or high pre-accident values actually reduce total loss frequency. The higher, the more cars work before the accident, all else equal to more prone it is to be repaired and so eventually certainly if there is a decline in ASPs or decline in vehicle values, the offsetting consideration is that we would see higher total loss frequency and therefore higher consignment volume.
We continue to make our operating and strategic decisions predicated on the expectation of long-term growth post pandemic, consistent certainly with what we've communicated over the years. We're grateful for the strong financial performance this quarter against the backdrop of a pandemic and now severe weather events all over the world. It can feel awkward to sound a congratulatory tone on the call, but nonetheless, we're certainly pleased with our results in the fourth quarter, excited about the year ahead. Our business is stronger than it has ever been. The quality of our team, the sophistication of our technology stack and the depth of our auction liquidity, we think is yielding better results than ever for our customers.
With that, let me turn it over to our CFO, John North.