Prius, Transit and Lada: what actually drives on Georgia's roads

In the courtyard of an apartment block in a Georgian town, a hybrid Toyota Prius, a white Ford Transit minibus and an old Lada on local plates may stand side by side.

That combination is not accidental. How many vehicles the country has and what they are is known precisely: the National Statistics Office of Georgia keeps a record of registrations and publishes the data by brand, model, age, engine and region.

This article explains in detail how many vehicles there are in Georgia, which brands and models they are, how old they are, what they run on, in which regions they are registered and why the composition is what it is.

How many vehicles the country has

The data on the Geostat portal begin in 2000. The number of vehicles is usually given in two forms: as a total and per thousand residents.

At the end of 2025 there were 1,914,908 vehicles on the register, or 486 per thousand residents by Geostat's calculation. Only registrations with active status are counted: a vehicle taken off the register is not included in that figure. In 2000 there were 313,700, or 78 per thousand. Over twenty-five years the number of vehicles grew sixfold.

Growth has not stopped in recent years either. In 2017 the register held 1,228,123 vehicles; over eight years their number rose by a further 686,785.

That figure covers every registered vehicle, not only passenger cars: 147,327 of them are lorries and 23,826 are buses.

What vehicles are driven in Georgia

The register distinguishes vehicles by brand and model, by year of manufacture, by engine size and by fuel type. On each of those counts the distribution is uneven.

Brands and models

The Georgian register lists several hundred brands and 26,955 models. The ten most common brands account for 69% of all registrations.

First place goes to Mercedes-Benz with 229,229 vehicles. Second is Toyota with 218,447. The gap between them is under eleven thousand and is closing fast: in 2017 there were more than twice as many Mercedes vehicles, 168,821 against 79,035. Third is Ford with 191,148.

Fourth place goes to VAZ, the maker of the Lada, with 152,478 vehicles. It is the only brand in the top ten whose numbers have fallen over eight years: in 2017 the register held 156,379 of them.

The table below lists the ten most common models at the end of 2025.

By body type, saloons come first with 623,880. Hatchbacks are second with 352,119 and off-road vehicles third with 345,326. The number of off-road vehicles is growing fastest: there were 158,930 in 2017, and over eight years the figure has doubled. Panel vans number 83,426 and minivans 64,127.

Year of manufacture

Age is counted from the year of manufacture, and vehicles are sorted into four groups: under two years, two to five, five to ten and over ten.

At the end of 2025, 1,541,196 vehicles were older than ten years, which is 80.5% of all registrations. Five years ago that group was larger still: in 2020 it held 1,189,223 vehicles out of 1,404,471, or 84.7%. The share has fallen by 4.2 percentage points in five years.

Vehicles under two years old number 39,995, or 2%.

Engine size and fuel

The register records both the engine size and the fuel a vehicle runs on.

The largest group, 843,924 vehicles, has an engine of two litres or less. Between two and three litres covers 471,081, and above three litres 220,644. For another 379,259 vehicles the register gives no engine size.

There are 796,250 petrol vehicles and 373,633 diesel ones. Hybrids come third with 188,899 vehicles. In 2017 there were 23,665 of them, so the number has since grown eightfold. Electric vehicles number 15,581, against 852 in 2017. Petrol-and-gas vehicles account for 187,016, and a further 351,476 fall under other fuel types.

Geostat tracks fuel prices separately. In 2025 a litre of petrol cost 2.98 lari on average, diesel 3.30 and liquefied gas 1.61.

How the vehicles are spread across the regions

Georgia has eleven regions, and the population is spread between them unevenly. Vehicles are spread more unevenly still.

Almost half of all registrations are in Tbilisi — 882,418 out of 1,914,908, or 46%. Imereti, the next region down, has four times fewer, and Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti has 11,401 vehicles on the register.

The table below lists all eleven regions: how many vehicles each has on the register and which brand comes first there.

Toyota is the country's second brand, but Tbilisi is the only region where it comes first.

Tax on import

No cars are built in Georgia, so every vehicle enters the country through customs. Two taxes are paid on import: excise duty and customs duty. No VAT is charged on the import of a passenger car, which is stated directly in Article 173 of the Tax Code.

Excise is the larger of the two, and it is calculated not from the price of the car but from the engine size: a rate in lari is multiplied by the number of cubic centimetres. The rate itself depends on the age of the car.

Until 1 April 2026 the rate did not move with age in a straight line. For a new car it was 1.5 lari per cubic centimetre, for a three-year-old one 1.4 and for a five-year-old one 1.0. The rate was at its lowest between six and eight years of age — 0.8 lari. After eight years it rose again: 1.1 in the tenth year, 1.5 in the twelfth and 2.4 for cars older than fourteen. The whole scale is set out in Article 188 of the Tax Code.

The cheapest car to import was one aged six to eight years with a small engine. On a 1.5-litre car of that age the excise came to 1,200 lari; on a three-litre car of the same year, 2,400.

The scale has three exceptions:

• a left-hand-drive hybrid up to six years old has the rate cut by 60%;
• left-hand-drive electric vehicles are exempt from excise altogether, under Article 194;
• a right-hand-drive car has the rate tripled.

The second payment, customs duty, is much smaller than the excise: 0.05 lari per cubic centimetre plus 5% of that sum for each year of age. On the same six-year-old 1.5-litre car it comes to 97.5 lari. The duty is set by Article 197.

On 1 April 2026 the rates were changed by law No. 1477. There are now two: 1.5 lari per cubic centimetre for cars up to six years old and 4.5 lari for all the rest. The hybrid discount and the triple rate for right-hand drive were kept.

The difference shows in an example. For a ten-year-old Toyota Prius with a 1,798 cubic centimetre engine the excise would have been 1,978 lari under the old scale and is 8,091 under the new one. The age bracket that carried the lowest rate no longer exists.

Questions people ask about cars in Georgia

Why are there so many Toyota Prius cars in Georgia? The register holds 51,127 of them, and the country has 188,899 hybrids, eight times more than in 2017. Importing a left-hand-drive hybrid up to six years old cuts the excise by 60%, and a litre of petrol cost 2.98 lari on average in 2025.

Can a right-hand-drive car be imported into Georgia? It can, but the excise is three times the normal rate: 4.5 lari per cubic centimetre for a car up to six years old and 13.5 lari for an older one. A right-hand-drive electric car pays a flat 3,000 lari.

How many vehicles are registered in Georgia each year? There were 161,132 first registrations in 2025.

Which model is the most common in Georgia? The Ford Transit, with 57,532 registered. The Toyota Prius is second with 51,127.

Which car should a visitor drive in Georgia? Any ordinary car will do for Tbilisi, Batumi and the highway between them. Tusheti, Khevsureti and upper Svaneti need a four-wheel-drive off-roader: the roads there are unpaved and open only in summer. The fleet has both.

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A car does not have to be collected from an office: with delivery it is brought anywhere in Tbilisi in about half an hour and picked up the same way. Models are listed in the fleet.

Message the concierge on WhatsApp or Telegram at +995 557 437 034 or at concierge@autohub.ge, name the model and the dates, and the documents and deposit are checked before the car is delivered.

Cover photo: a Lada on Georgian plates in the Kiketi neighbourhood of Tbilisi, May 2025. Yuri Samoylov, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0