A flood of newly registered cars hit the Maltese roads last year, probably making the already bad congestion even worse.

Official figures out yesterday showed that 20,000 new or second-hand vehicles were registered in 2014 while 3,000 were scrapped or exported and another 8,000 declared garaged.

This puts the net increase at 9,000.

According to the National Statistics Office figures, there were 335,249 cars on the roads by the end of last year.

In 2014 Malta imported just under 5,000 cars every three months. But for the third year in a row, used cars, most of them imported from the UK, surpassed the number of new ones. Out of the 19,213 imported cars, more than 11,000 were second hand.

The NSO said that at the end of last year, nearly 61 per cent of all cars had a petrol engine.

More than 79 per cent of cars were passenger vehicles, nearly 13 per cent were commercial and 5.5 per cent were motorcycles.

Buses and mini-buses accounted for less than one per cent of licensed cars.