Car buyers continued to prefer second-hand models in the first six months of the year.

There were fewer newly-licensed vehicles compared to the same period last year but, of the 8,345, more than half were used.

The government scrappage scheme to encourage drivers of old cars to buy new ones seems to have had limited impact: there were 4,747 newly-licensed second-hand cars as opposed to 3,598 new ones.

Over the past few years, a craze for imported second-hand cars has swept the island, with dealers and even individual buyers bringing them down from the UK and Japan.

Figures released by the National Statistics Office show that the number of licensed motor vehicles stood at 314,299 at the end of June, of which nearly 80 per cent were private cars.