You’re Not Imagining It, Most Of Malta’s Cars Are Very Old
The overwhelming majority of passenger cars on Maltese roads are between 10 to 20 years old, data shows. An impressive 45,000 vehicles are even older than 20, while there’s less than 17,000 cars that are aged two years or less.
Tallying all the data, we can see that locally the average age of cars in the archipelago is around 14 years old.
The reason why this might be a problem (apart from the heavy environmental impact of older engines) is best illustrated in the below video, which shows a car safety rating company of crash-test on the same make and model of car – the only difference being that one car is from 1998 while the other is from 2015.
Suffice to say, “they don’t make them how they used to” also applies to cars; the main difference being they now make them much safer.
As mentioned above, besides being safer, newer cars also pollute less, which is why governments actively try and get people to part with their older cars.
In Malta that’s often taken the form of a scrappage scheme, where people wishing to replace their old car with a newer one are eligible for a grant after scrapping the old one, i.e. Removing it completely from our roads. The usual price varies between €700 to €900.