About auto-stats.eu

Why the site exists

Every country publishes its registration data, but each does it differently: Lithuania as a quarterly dump of the whole register, Germany as monthly PDF and Excel tables, Estonia as a daily open-data file plus register snapshots, Latvia as a monthly Excel workbook, Finland as PxWeb statistical tables, the United Kingdom as quarterly data tables, the Netherlands as a daily open-data register read through an API, Spain as a monthly microdata file with one record per registration and Poland as a register API read one region and one month at a time. Make and model names are spelled inconsistently within a single source, let alone across countries, and definitions such as "new car" or "hybrid" differ. This site does the tedious part once: it downloads each source, normalises the names, applies one set of definitions per country and publishes the result as readable pages and as JSON that anyone can reuse. Where a definition cannot be aligned across countries, the methodology page for that country says so instead of pretending the figures are comparable.

Sources and update cadence

• Lithuania: the open-data vehicle register of AB Regitra, published quarterly. The site counts vehicles first registered in the month that are still on the register at the extract date, and calibrates that against Regitra's official monthly first-registration totals (see Methodology › Lithuania, in particular the survivorship section).
• Germany: the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA) monthly tables FZ 10, FZ 11 and FZ 28 on new passenger-car registrations by make, model series, segment, fuel and federal state. Germany counts new cars only; the KBA does not publish used imports in this form. Updated after each monthly KBA release (Methodology › Germany).
• Estonia: Transpordiamet's open data, a daily first-registration file for counts and a register snapshot for fuel and CO₂. Updated monthly (Methodology › Estonia).
• Latvia: the monthly passenger-car statistics of CSDD, the road traffic safety directorate. Updated monthly (Methodology › Latvia).
• Finland: Traficom's statistical tables of first registrations and used imports, mainland Finland. Updated monthly (Methodology › Finland).
• Ireland: the Central Statistics Office's (CSO) vehicle licensing statistics, new and second-hand private cars licensed for the first time, from its PxStat tables. Updated monthly (Methodology › Ireland).
• Czechia: the importers' association SDA/CIA's monthly statistics compiled from the Ministry of Transport's central vehicle register, new cars and used imports. Updated monthly (Methodology › Czechia).
• Romania: the Ministry of Interior's (DGPCI / DRPCIV) monthly registration files, one row per passenger car first registered, new and used imports. Updated monthly (Methodology › Romania).
• Luxembourg: SNCA's monthly "Opérations Delta" file on data.public.lu (CC0), one row per register operation, of which the new registrations and used imports of passenger cars are counted; STATEC's monthly tables confirm every month to the unit (one file, December 2023, runs about 50 cars short). Updated monthly (Methodology › Luxembourg).
• Belgium: FPS Mobility's (DIV) yearly open-data file of registrations by month, make and commercial name, new and used (CC0), checked against Statbel's yearly totals. Published once a year, so the latest month is the December of the last released year (Methodology › Belgium).
• Austria: Statistik Austria's open government data tables of new and used passenger-car registrations by make (CC BY 4.0), with the fuel mix and the top-20 model and top-10 electric lists from its monthly press workbooks; no full model table exists, so the Austrian pages are brand-level. Updated monthly (Methodology › Austria).
• Switzerland: auto-schweiz's monthly statistics of new passenger-car registrations by make and model (source: the federal roads office's register, ASTRA / MOFIS), for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, checked every month against the Federal Statistical Office's series. New cars only, like Germany. Updated monthly (Methodology › Switzerland).
• Sweden: Mobility Sweden's monthly report of new passenger-car registrations by make and model, fuel, electric ranking and private-versus-company split, checked every month against Trafikanalys's official monthly workbook. New cars only, like Germany and Switzerland. Updated monthly (Methodology › Sweden).
• Denmark: Statistics Denmark's StatBank series of new passenger cars by fuel and by household or business (BIL53) and of leasing (BIL55) for every month, plus Mobility Denmark's registrations by make and model, which the association publishes only for its two most recent months and which auto-stats.eu captures month by month. New cars only. Updated monthly (Methodology › Denmark).
• United Kingdom: the Department for Transport's vehicle licensing statistics (table VEH0160), first registrations of cars by make and generic model, quarterly, about three months after the quarter (Methodology › United Kingdom).
• Netherlands: the RDW vehicle register, read through RDW's open-data API a few days after each month ends and frozen there, with CBS StatLine table 85898NED as the official check on new-car counts. Updated monthly (Methodology › Netherlands).
• Spain: the DGT's monthly registration microdata, one fixed-width record per registration, published about six weeks after each month ends. Updated monthly (Methodology › Spain).
• Poland: the CEPiK vehicle register read through its open API, every registration individually, refreshed daily until a month is fourteen days old (Methodology › Poland).

The date each country's data runs to is shown in the footer of its pages and in its meta.json. Nothing on the site is estimated or forecast: every figure is either taken from the source as published or computed from it with the rules described in the methodology pages.

What is computed and what to watch for

Month-over-month and year-over-year changes, year-to-date totals, market shares, fuel and electric shares, brand and model rankings and average import ages are all computed here from the source counts. Percentages are suppressed when the comparison month is too small for them to mean anything. Three caveats matter most when reading across countries. First, Lithuania's register only holds cars that are still registered, so older months are lower than the official first-registration counts and year-on-year growth is overstated; the official totals are shown alongside. Second, Germany's figures cover new cars only, while the other eight countries count new cars and used imports together, which lowers their electric shares because used imports are older and mostly combustion-engined. Third, Latvia and Finland record full hybrids as petrol or diesel, so their hybrid share covers plug-in hybrids only and is not comparable with the other markets; Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom count hybrids without a plug as a group of their own, and none of those sources separates full hybrids from mild hybrids, so the group includes both. The United Kingdom, unlike the others, publishes no split between new cars and used imports at all, and it is published by quarter rather than by month. The Netherlands counts new cars and used imports together but, unlike Latvia and Finland, does separate hybrids from plug-in hybrids; its monthly new-car counts are checked against the official CBS series before they are published. Spain, like the Netherlands, counts new cars and used imports together; it excludes temporary plates, so a car put on one is counted once, when its plate becomes definitive, rather than twice. Poland, too, counts new cars and used imports together — every passenger car in the month it first enters the Polish register, told apart by its registration dates rather than by the register's own origin label, which changes when a car is resold; unlike the Netherlands or Spain it cannot separate plug-in hybrids from full hybrids at all, because CEPiK does not record whether a hybrid has a plug, so its hybrid group holds both. The insights pages compare the countries with these differences spelled out.

Reusing the data

Text, tables and derived data on this site are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: name auto-stats.eu and the original register or statistics office as the source. Estonian figures measured on the register snapshot are CC BY-SA 4.0 because that is the snapshot's own licence. Every page has a JSON counterpart under /data/<country>/, listed in llms.txt, and the pipeline that builds the site is open source on GitHub, so any number can be traced back to the source file it came from.

Who runs it

auto-stats.eu is a private, one-person project with no connection to any vehicle register, statistics office, manufacturer or dealer; the sources are public and the site takes nothing from them that is not already published. It is financed by advertising, which is why there are ads on the pages with written content. Corrections and questions are welcome at dovydz@gmail.com, and if a figure looks wrong the fastest way to check it is the methodology page for that country, which documents every rule the number depends on.