Although you can certainly visit Malta with your car and drive it around, gone are the days when you could leave it here and drive it on your home country license plates.

At some point, and sooner rather than later, you will need to register the car for it be licensed and road legal in Malta. Failure to do so could mean hefty fines at best, and the car being impounded and auctioned off at worst.

If you’re thinking of registering a car in Malta, you should be aware that the process is not without its complications. Whether you’re a local, an expat, or moving to Malta for work, moving a car here will probably not be the easiest thing you’ve ever done.

We have a little experience with the process of registering a car in Malta, and we also carried out some research to further inform us. Of course, none of the information included here is to be construed as gospel truth, and changes may happen at any time, so before you turn up at Transport Malta offices with a car in tow, check, check, and check again.

Steve is trying to import a car from the UK to Malta, because buying new cars from Malta is, compared to UK prices, exorbitant. If he was in the UK, Steve would get “a little SUV-type thing”, as that would suit his and his wife’s lifestyle and needs. Steve’s current car is a BMW 5-Series Touring, but since we’re talking SUVs, let’s say Steve wants to spend eight thousand pounds, or around €9000.

For that money, you can get a super reliable – but not particularly exciting – Honda CRV, a 2010 model, 70,000 miles on the clock. The cost of registration of that car to be licensed and driven in Malta is….

€5,170, which might have changed because they amend the values every month.

There’s a website – valuation.vehicleregistration.gov.mt, with a list of drop-downs and when you enter all the car’s details, you hit ‘proceed’ and it gives you a registration amount.

That amount is how much it’s going to cost you to register this particular car in Malta if you bring it over.

For example, a 2010 BMW, X-3, X-drive, two litre diesel, “immaculate throughout” according to the listing. Sells for £9000, or around €10000.

Cost to register is €3500.

This car is of pretty much the same age and same mileage as the Honda CRV. The similarity in cost of registration is likely down to it being a cleaner car in terms of fuel efficiency and emissions.

Let’s say a Suzuki Swift, 2010, 1.3 litre engine, with 30,000 kilometres on the clock.

Cost to register that is €1800.

Now, let’s say you want the Swift but one that’s a lot newer. A 2017 Suzuki Swift with a 1.2 litre engine, and 10,000 kilometres on the clock.

Cost? €1800.

We found a Mazda MX-5 1.8, Arctic Limited Edition, 104,000 miles on the clock, 1.8 litre engine, 2005 registration. You can pick that up for £1300.

To register the car it costs you €1900.

For five-and-a-bit thousand pounds, you can get a 320-D BMW.

If you get the 2009 320-D M-Sport, around 95,000 miles, that’s going to cost you €2500 to register, again, a bit less than half the car’s value for it to be registered.

But, for pretty much the same money, maybe a little bit more to buy, you can get a 2010 320-D Efficient Dynamics. You might think, ‘newer car, less mileage, it’s going to be more expensive to register’.

It isn’t.

It’s actually less; €1600.

It’s €900 cheaper to register a slightly newer car with less mileage, because it’s the Efficient Dynamics, therefore it’s more economical, and we’re guessing that because of the lower emissions, it’s so much cheaper to register.

Let’s say you want a Mini Clubman. We found two of them; a 2010 Mini Clubman with 75,000 miles on the clock, or a Mini Clubman Cooper-S, of same year, same mileage.

The Mini Clubman Cooper-S costs €2,700 to register. The Mini Clubman Cooper is €1,800.

Once again it’s nearly €900 savings on the same car. Sure, there’s a couple of seconds’ difference in nought to sixty times, but it’s the same car, and it’s a difference of €900 just for picking the right model.

Let’s take a 1.4 TSI VW Golf from 2010 as an example; you could pick that up for about five thousand quid. To register that it’s going to be €2000, which is not entirely unreasonable, but it’s a third of the value of the car.

Another option is going for the 1.6 TDI (That is, if you want a diesel, which we wouldn’t recommend in Malta. Here’s why.) But, a 1.6 TDI of same mileage and same year, that costs only €1600 to register, so it’s €400 cheaper.

If you wanted to get somewhere in the middle, you might go for a 2 litre TDI GT, which would be €1900 to register. So basically a 2 litre TDI GT is actually the same cost to register as a 1.4 TSI. Petrol, and the TSI is only marginally slower.