What Malta actually runs, in numbers

At the end of December 2025 there were 457,403 licensed motor vehicles in Malta, according to the National Statistics Office. Commercial and agricultural vehicles made up 14.3 per cent of that stock, so roughly 65,000 vehicles. The total grew by an average of 35 vehicles a day over that quarter.

Two things follow from that for anyone running vans here. The first is congestion. A dense vehicle stock on a small road network means journey times are dominated by traffic rather than distance, so planning a round by kilometres tells you very little. Stop duration and time of day tell you far more.

The second is that Maltese trips are short. A van doing a full working day here covers a fraction of what the same van would cover in Italy or Germany. That changes what is worth measuring. Fuel burn per kilometre is a poor signal on a route where the engine spends a large share of its time idling in traffic. Idle time itself, and time spent at each stop, are the numbers that move cost.

It also changes hardware choice. Short trips with frequent ignition cycles are harder on a device than long motorway runs, and a plug-in unit in a shared van gets knocked out more often than one that is wired in. That is part of why we fit a lot of hardwired installs here despite OBD being faster to deploy.

None of this is exotic. It is just that advice written for a mainland fleet transfers badly to an island where the longest possible road journey is under 40 kilometres.