How many cars are there in Mauritius?

234,000 more cars, and 611 more buses

In 2011 there were 136,226 cars registered in Mauritius. By July 2026 there were 370,130. That is 233,904 more cars on the same roads, an increase of 172%.

Over exactly the same period, buses went from 2,912 to 3,523. Six hundred and eleven more buses, an increase of 21%.

Nobody planned that. It is just what happens when a car becomes affordable slightly faster than public transport improves.

Every vehicle, not just cars

The full register went from 400,919 vehicles in 2011 to 764,097 in July 2026, up 91%. Motorcycles nearly two and a half times over, from 53,409 to 132,702.

The population did not do anything of the sort. It has hovered around 1.2 million throughout.

What the numbers do not say

These are registrations, not traffic. A registered vehicle can be off the road, off the island, or sitting under a tarpaulin, and the register still counts it. Nobody publishes how many cars are on the M1 at ten to eight.

The July 2026 column is also a part year, so it is not directly comparable with the full years before it.

And the metro figure further down counts rides over a financial year, while these are vehicles on a register in July 2026. Different measures over different periods, not two halves of one comparison.

Even allowing for all of that, the direction is not in doubt, and it has been the same direction for fifteen years.

One more thing, if you are reading both pages of numbers on this site. Everything here is the register at July 2026. The 2026 registrations page counts the same register at the end of April, three months earlier, so its totals run a few thousand lower. Same source, different date, not a contradiction.

How many new vehicles were registered in 2026

What about the Metro Express?

The Metro Express carried 12,111,804 passenger rides in the 2024-25 financial year, around a million a month. Rides rather than people, so a commuter making a return trip is two of them, but it still works out at roughly forty-six thousand journeys on every working day.

Whatever else that number says, it ends the argument that Mauritians will not share a vehicle. Given a way to share that is quick and turns up when it says it will, hundreds of thousands of us take it.

What a line cannot do is come to you. It runs where the rails run. If your morning is Moka to Ebene, or Flacq to anywhere, the metro is not a choice you get to make, however willing you are. And the willingness is not the missing part.

That is also why plenty of people drive to a station and park there. Getting to the metro is itself a trip somebody near you is already making.

The road is not getting longer

You cannot add 234,000 cars to an island of this size and expect the morning to hold. Widening helps once. The cars arrive every year.

The one lever an ordinary person has is the empty seats. Most of those 370,130 cars go to work with one person in them, along the same few roads, at the same hour.

Where Lotokam comes in

Lotokam introduces you to somebody already making your trip, at your time, so two of those cars become one. Free, no money moves through the app, and your number stays private until you have both agreed.

It will not empty the motorway. It will get you a companion for the queue, and give you back half the mornings you currently spend driving.