Methodology

Sources

Transpordiamet (the Estonian Transport Administration) publishes two open datasets on andmed.eesti.ee that this site combines:

• First-registered vehicles ("Esmaselt registreeritud sõidukid", CC BY 4.0): one file per year, refreshed daily, with the number of vehicles first registered in Estonia per month, category, make, model and year of first registration, and how many of them were new. Current extract: 2026-09-06. This file is the source of every count on the site.
• Vehicle register snapshot ("Sõidukite staatused Eestis", CC BY-SA 4.0): one row per vehicle in the register on the 1st of the month with fuel, CO₂, holder type and both registration dates. Current snapshot: 2026-09-01; snapshots used: 2024-01-01, 2025-01-01, 2026-01-01, 2026-09-01. This file only supplies attributes.

Latest complete month: 2026-08. Data from January 2023; the site shows the latest 36 months.

What is counted

• Categories M1 and M1G (passenger cars including off-road passenger cars), Transpordiamet's own definition of "sõiduautod". Lithuania on this site counts M1 only.
• A registration is a vehicle first registered in Estonia in the month, as counted by Transpordiamet.
• New: counted as new by Transpordiamet (first registration anywhere is the Estonian one). Used import: everything else, i.e. first registered abroad earlier. The private share of new cars is also from the official file: cars whose registered owner is a private person (a leased car belongs to the leasing company). The register snapshot's holder type is not used for this, because it names the authorised user at snapshot date and drifts as leases are bought out.
• Age at import: registration year minus the year of first registration; brackets under 3, 3–5, 6–10 and over 10 years. Estonia does not publish the country of previous registration, so there is no origin table.
• Fuel groups (from the snapshot): battery electric (electric-only drive), plug-in hybrid (OVC-HEV), hybrid (NOVC-HEV), LPG/CNG (gas as main or additional fuel without electrification), petrol, diesel (incl. biodiesel), other (hydrogen and fuel cells). Not recorded means the snapshot has no fuel entry.

KPI definitions

Registrations

All passenger cars (M1 and M1G) first registered in Estonia in the month: new cars plus used imports, from Transpordiamet's daily first-registration file.

New cars / New share

Cars counted as new by Transpordiamet: the first registration anywhere is the Estonian one. New share = new cars ÷ all registrations.

Used imports / Avg import age (yrs)

Cars first registered abroad before Estonia. Average import age = registration year minus the year of first registration (the source carries years, not dates).

New cars, private holders

Share of the month's new cars whose registered owner is a private person. A car leased by a private person belongs to the leasing company and counts as company-owned, like rental, dealer and fleet cars. From the official first-registration counts.

BEV share

Battery-electric cars as a share of all cars in the month measured on the register snapshot (see the snapshot note). PHEV = plug-in hybrids, counted separately. Hybrid = electrified without a plug.

Avg CO₂, new (g/km)

Mean type-approval CO₂ of the month's new cars, WLTP where available. Battery-electric cars count as 0 g/km; plug-in hybrids mostly have no value in the register and are left out.

MoM / YoY / YTD

Change versus the previous month, versus the same month a year earlier, and the calendar-year-to-date total (with its change versus the same period a year earlier).

Why fuel figures come from a snapshot, and what that costs

The first-registration file has no fuel or CO₂ columns, so those attributes are measured on the register snapshot. A snapshot only holds cars still in the register, and Transpordiamet may overwrite a car's Estonian first-registration date when it is re-registered, so a snapshot taken long after a month undercounts that month: measured against the official file, months nine to twelve months old already show 8–15% fewer cars and up to 28% fewer new cars. The site therefore reads each month from the first snapshot dated after the month ended, which matches the official count within 1%. Monthly snapshots are archived from September 2026 on; every earlier month is measured on a later file (the following 1 January snapshot for 2023–2025, the 1 September 2026 file for January–July 2026), so its fuel shares come from a sample that is a few percent depleted. The caption on each month page names the snapshot used. Fuel and electric tables carry a caption with the snapshot date and the number of cars it holds for the month. Counts, ranks and changes are never taken from the snapshot.

Caveats

• Counts are Transpordiamet's official first registrations of passenger cars (M1 and M1G) in Estonia in the month; they are complete and are not affected by later exports or deregistrations.
• Percentages are shown only when the comparison month has at least 30 registrations.
• Brands with fewer than 50 registrations over the 36 months have no brand page and appear as plain text in the tables.
• Make and model names are normalised (body variants such as Avant, Sportback or Kombi fold into the base model; engine codes such as 320d fold into the BMW series; Mercedes-Benz is grouped by class; electric variants named e-, E- or -e fold into the base model). Camper and special-body converters that the register names after the chassis maker ("Fiat Dethleffs", "Mercedes-Benz Hymer") are shown under the converter's own brand, as in Lithuania. The full alias table is in the repository.
• Registration is not sale: dealer demo stock and leasing fleets register too.

Data files

Every page is generated from JSON under /data/ee/: meta.json, months.json, YYYY-MM.json, makes.json, makes/<slug>.json. Free to reuse with attribution to Transpordiamet and auto-stats.eu (CC BY-SA 4.0, because the snapshot dataset is share-alike).