Methodology behind our registration data

Where the data comes from

We work with the vehicle registration microdata published by Spain’s Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT). It is the administrative register: one line per registered vehicle, with its make, model, technology, province and type of owner. These are not estimates or surveys.

The DGT publishes it in two releases:

The consolidated file replaces the preliminary release: it is the final version of the month and may correct, add or remove records. That is why the figures for the most recent days are provisional, and we say so on every page.

We use a second file from the same source, the ownership transfers file, for the used-car market. It records changes of owner of vehicles already registered in Spain.

The original DGT microdata is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Our work based on it is covered by its own terms, set out below.

What we don’t do. We don’t take figures from industry associations or from other websites. We don’t fill gaps with estimates: if a piece of data is not in the register, we don’t publish it.

Data quality

We measure ourselves against the quality criteria for European statistics: the seven set out in Article 12 of Regulation (EC) No 223/2009, which are the ones applied by Eurostat and the national statistical institutes. In practice we are a producer of statistics working from an administrative register, and we think it is fair to be judged by the same standard.

We will publish the measurement of each criterion in this section. It is the next thing we are going to build.

What we count

Every figure on the site belongs to a defined population: which procedure was recorded, whether the vehicle was new or used, what type of vehicle it is, which technology and which period. Change any of those pieces and you get a different figure, which is why every figure states the population it belongs to.

A market share is always calculated on the same population and the same cut-off date. A region’s share is calculated on that region’s market, not on Spain’s.

What each technology means

The technology we publish is the one recorded in the DGT register.

Two points worth bearing in mind when reading any figure on this site:

• “Electrified” and “plug-in” are not the same thing. When we group technologies, non-plug-in hybrids are left out: they cannot be charged from the grid and do not run on electricity beyond a few metres. If one ever appears within a grouping in a chart, the chart itself says so.
• The range-extender category is a classification in the register, not a census of that technology. Under EU rules a range-extender vehicle is type-approved as a plug-in hybrid, and the register does not always separate the two. Some cars with this technology are counted as plug-in hybrids. We publish the category as it comes, which is why we do not state how many range-extender vehicles are registered in total.

What date the data refers to

Every page shows its date. The cut-off date is the date of the last registration included, not the day you are looking at the site.

• Closed period. A year or a month already consolidated. The figure is final, barring revisions by the source.
• Current period. The year or the month that has not ended yet. The figure is what has actually happened up to the cut-off date, and it is compared with the same days of the previous period: the first N days of this year against the first N days of last year. Never against a full period, because the two would not be comparable.

Figures for the most recent days may shift when the consolidated file for the month arrives.

What these figures cannot tell you

This is the most important section of the page. The DGT register answers some questions and not others, and mixing them up is the most common mistake when reading registration data.

The location is the owner’s, not where the car was sold.

Figures by region and province are allocated according to the address of the registered owner. A fleet or a finance company based in Madrid registers cars there that will be driven somewhere else.

Breakdowns by use overlap and do not add up.

Private, company, leasing, rental and taxi are filters on the same population, not slices of a pie. A taxi can be leased and registered to a company, and it counts in all three.

There is no figure for ride-hailing (VTC).

The register records “chauffeur hire”, which groups VTC ride-hailing cars with other uses. We do not publish VTC figures because the source does not allow them to be isolated.

“Company” means the owner is a legal entity.

That includes fleets, leasing companies, dealerships and one-person companies set up by the self-employed. It does not mean “company car” in the usual sense.

Origin does not mean the car was imported second-hand.

It is the origin of the vehicle’s identification data, which for a new car shows where it was built. Most new cars registered in Spain are recorded as coming from the European Union because that is where they are made.

An ownership transfer is not a registration.

They are two different events, in two different registers, and they are not added together. A car generates one registration when it joins the vehicle stock and as many transfers as the times it changes owner.

We do not publish the number of cars on the road.

The register gives us the vehicles coming in, not those taken off the road. Any figure for “electric cars on the road” calculated as registrations minus deregistrations would be wrong, so we do not give one.

Our figures may not match others you have seen.

The differences come from three places: what counts as a passenger car, the cut-off date of each publication and how revisions are handled. Everyone builds their figure with their own criteria, and several can be right at the same time. Ours comes from the official microdata, with the criteria set out on this page.

When a field is incomplete, we say so.

Some technical data is not recorded for every vehicle. When we publish an average, we state how many records it is based on.

We only publish what the register says.

Cross-references with our own model database —price, battery capacity, official range— are analysis and are published as such, outside this section.

How to cite us

You may cite our figures in articles, studies and publications. The wording:

Two more things we appreciate, and which also protect your citation:

• A link to the page the figure comes from, not to the home page.
• The cut-off date. Figures for an open period are revised when the consolidated file for the month arrives, so a dated citation stays true even if the figure changes later.

Licence: two separate layers

The source data being open does not make our work open: the licence of the raw material is not inherited. And the other way round, nothing we do limits your right to go to the original source and work with it yourself: it is published and free of charge.

The full conditions are in our Terms of use.

Corrections

If you find a mistake, write to us. We are particularly interested in what we cannot spot on our own: a misattributed model, a figure that does not match another source, or data that contradicts what this page says.

When we correct a published figure, we say so. Revisions that come from the source itself —the move from the daily preliminary release to the consolidated monthly file— are not errors and are explained above.

Our corrections policy sets out how we handle each case.