Methodology

Source

CSDD (Ceļu satiksmes drošības direkcija, the Latvian Road Traffic Safety Directorate) publishes the country's first registrations of passenger cars as one workbook on its monthly vehicle-data page. A single file covers January 2000 onward, with one row per month, make, model, production year, registration class, holder type and fuel, plus the summed age at registration. Current file extracted: 2026-09-13. Latest complete month: 2026-07. The site shows the latest 36 months. CSDD publishes a month only once it is complete, so nothing on these pages is provisional and there is no register snapshot behind any figure: every number here is CSDD's own.

What is counted

• Category M1 — passenger cars, CSDD's "Vieglais" class.
• A registration is a first registration in Latvia in the month, as counted by CSDD. Transit registrations issued for export are not included.
• New: CSDD's "Jauns" class — the Latvian registration is the car's first anywhere.
• Used import: CSDD's "Lietots" class plus the "180 dienas" class (cars first registered abroad less than 180 days before the Latvian registration). Both are counted as used imports; the 180-day class also gets its own tile, because a car that was abroad for only a few months is close to new.
• Age at import: the car's age on the day of the Latvian registration, taken from CSDD's summed ages per make, model and production year, so it is day-precise rather than year-granular. Brackets: under 3, 3–5, 6–10 and over 10 years. Latvia does not publish the country of previous registration, so there is no origin table.
• Fuel groups: petrol, diesel, plug-in hybrid (CSDD's "Elektrība un benzīns / dīzeļdegviela"), battery electric, LPG/CNG, other (hydrogen), and not recorded where the file carries no fuel. Full hybrids without a plug are recorded by CSDD as petrol or diesel, so they cannot be shown separately.
• Holder: private persons ("FP") versus legal persons ("JP" — leasing, rental, dealers and fleets). The private share covers all registrations, new and used together.

KPI definitions

Registrations

All passenger cars (M1) first registered in Latvia in the month, from CSDD's monthly statistics: new cars plus used imports.

New cars / New share

Cars registered as new by CSDD (transit registrations for export are not included). New share = new cars ÷ all registrations.

Used imports / Avg import age (yrs)

Cars first registered abroad before Latvia, including the 180-day class. Average import age = mean age at registration, from CSDD's day-precise ages.

Private holders

Share of the month's registrations held by private persons (CSDD 'FP') rather than legal persons ('JP': leasing, rental, dealers, fleets).

BEV share

Battery-electric cars as a share of all registrations in the month. PHEV = plug-in hybrids (CSDD 'Elektrība un benzīns/dīzeļdegviela'); full hybrids are recorded as petrol or diesel and cannot be separated.

180-day imports

Used imports first registered abroad less than 180 days before the Latvian registration (CSDD's '180 dienas' class); included in the used-import count.

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).

Checks

Every export runs the same gates as the other markets: the top 40 makes and models are reviewed for coverage, sibling makes that should be one brand, and single-letter or otherwise suspect model names. A sanity gate rejects an export whose latest month is less than half the previous month or whose month series has a gap since January 2023. A totals gate compares each of the latest three months against CSDD's own class-totals workbook and fails if any month is more than 1 % away. Two further gates require that at least 98% of the latest month's used imports carry an age and that unrecognised fuel values stay under 2% of its registrations.

Caveats

• Counts are CSDD's official first registrations of passenger cars (M1) in Latvia in the month; they are complete and are not affected by later exports or deregistrations. Full hybrids are recorded as petrol or diesel.
• Percentages are shown only when the comparison month has at least 30 registrations.
• 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). The full alias table is in the repository.
• Brands with fewer than 50 registrations over the 36 months have no brand page and appear as plain text in the tables.
• Registration is not sale: dealer demo stock and leasing fleets register too.

Data files

Every page is generated from JSON under /data/lv/: meta.json, months.json, YYYY-MM.json, makes.json, makes/<slug>.json. Free to reuse with attribution to CSDD and auto-stats.eu (CC BY 4.0).