Methodology

Source

AB Regitra publishes the full Lithuanian road-vehicle register as open data, refreshed quarterly within ten business days after quarter end. Current snapshot: 2026-07-01. Latest complete month: 2026-06.

What is counted

• Category M1 (passenger cars) only.
• A registration is a vehicle whose first registration in Lithuania date falls in the month.
• New: first registration anywhere equals first registration in Lithuania. Used import: the car was first registered abroad earlier. Cars imported on a US or Canadian title carry no first-registration date in the register, only a model year; they count as used imports when the model year predates the registration year, with age taken from the model year, and their origin country shows as UNKNOWN because the register leaves it blank. Rows where neither rule applies are counted in totals only.
• Origin country is the country whose documents the car was registered on. Age at import is the gap between the two registration dates.
• Fuel groups: battery electric (Elektra or the BEV flag), plug-in hybrid (OVC-HEV), hybrid (other electrified), LPG/CNG (any gas fuel without electrification), petrol, diesel, other. Not recorded means the register has no fuel entry yet, which happens for imports registered in the last weeks before an extract.

KPI definitions

Registrations

All passenger cars (M1) first registered in Lithuania in the month: new cars plus used imports.

New cars / New share

Cars whose first registration anywhere is the Lithuanian one. New share = new cars ÷ all registrations.

Used imports / Avg import age (yrs)

Cars first registered abroad before Lithuania. Average import age = time between first registration and Lithuanian registration.

Private holders

Share of the month's registrations held by private persons rather than companies (leasing, rental, dealers, fleets).

BEV share

Battery-electric cars (no combustion engine) as a share of all registrations in the month, new and used together. PHEV = plug-in hybrids, counted separately. Hybrid = electrified without a plug (full or mild hybrid). The electrified-share chart shows BEV, PHEV and hybrid as separate lines.

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).

Freshness

Regitra publishes the register quarterly, about ten business days after each quarter ends, and each file adds three months. The extract is taken a couple of working days before publication, so the most recent month is marked Provisional: its last few days arrive with the following release, which completes the month automatically. Every other month is frozen from the first snapshot taken after the month ended and is not recomputed from later extracts (see Survivorship below). The date the current data runs to is shown in the badge's tooltip and in /data/lt/meta.json as data_through.

Survivorship: why older months are lower than official counts

The open-data file is a picture of the register on one day: it lists the cars registered at that moment, not every registration that ever happened. A car that was registered in Lithuania and later exported or scrapped is missing from every month, however old. Lithuania re-exports many cars, so the loss is large and fast: measured against Regitra's official monthly statistics of first registrations, months that were a year old at the 2026-07-01 extract retain about 70% of their registrations (used imports about 66%, new cars about 85%; new cars registered in 2025 only 76%). Fresh months match the official figures within 1%.

Consequences: (1) totals for older months are lower than the official ones, by the amounts in the table; (2) year-on-year and year-to-date comparisons compare a fresh month with a depleted one and therefore overstate growth; (3) model and brand rankings within a month are affected only if survival differs between models.

What the site does about it: since the 2026-07-01 release every month is frozen from the first snapshot taken after the month ended, so months from mid-2026 onward keep their near-complete counts. For earlier months only the current picture exists (Regitra keeps no archive), so the official monthly totals are shown alongside, on each month page and in /data/lt/official.json. Official source: AB Regitra, monthly statistics of first registrations (M1).

Caveats

• Counts are vehicles first registered in Lithuania in the month and still registered when the register extract was taken. Months that are a year old are 10–30% below Regitra's official counts because cars have since been exported or scrapped, so year-on-year changes overstate growth; see Methodology › Survivorship.
• Percentages are shown only when the comparison month has at least 30 registrations.
• Regitra anonymises make and model where make, model and municipality would identify a single vehicle. Those cars appear in totals and as "OTHER (ANONYMISED)" in the brand table, never in model rankings.
• Make and model names are normalised from inconsistent register spellings (e.g. VW, VOLKSWAGEN, "VOLKSWAGEN. VW" → VOLKSWAGEN; body variants such as Avant or Variant are folded into the base model). Sub-brands written into the model field (Lexus, Mini, Jeep, Cupra) and manufacturer-group names ("Jaguar Land Rover Limited", "DaimlerChrysler") are resolved by model. BMW is grouped by series and Mercedes-Benz by class; Mini shows the hatch as MINI and body lines (Countryman, Clubman, Cabrio) separately. Electric variants named E-208, e-C4, Corsa-e, e-Niro and so on fold into the base model, as in KBA tables; models that only exist as electric cars (ID.4, e-tron, EQE) stay separate. 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/lt/: meta.json, months.json, YYYY-MM.json, makes.json, makes/<slug>.json. Free to reuse with attribution to Regitra and auto-stats.eu.