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As of 2005, France has three main kinds of motor vehicle registration plates:
- General scheme
- Military plates
- Civilian state administration plates (domaines).
Contents |
General scheme (until 2009)
The plate bears a "number" of the following formats: either nnnn LL dd, or nnn LLL dd.
- nnn (or nnnn) is a 2-, 3- or 4-digit number.
- LL (or LLL) is a 2- or 3-letter group.
- dd is a 2-digit number indicating the département in which the car is registered.
Exceptions to this scheme are:
- in Corsica, the département identifier has been either 2A (Corse-du-Sud) or 2B (Haute-Corse) since 1975. Prior to that date, all of Corsica was a single département with the identifier 20.
- in the overseas départments, the département identifer consists of 3 digits (in the series 971 to 978), the first two digits often being stacked to save space.
Vehicle owners must re-register their vehicle if they relocate permanently to another département. There used to be a once-per year tax on cars, called the vignette, whose rate depended on the department. This tax now exists only for corporate-owned vehicles (and there exist exemptions for small numbers of vehicles); it is thus no longer important to know the department of a car on sight. Furthermore, computerized files allow large national databases to be maintained without the need for them to be split them at local level.
A side effect of the vehicle tax system was that many corporations registered their vehicles in departments, such as Marne (51), with lower rates. Regulations aimed at preventing such schemes were passed in 1999.
General scheme (from 2009)
As of 2009 French vehicle registration plates will be based upon the XX-NNN-ZZ model successfully introduced in 1994 in Italy, composed of a series of 7 alphanumeric characters, made up of 2 letters, 3 numbers and then 2 letters (for instance: AB-123-CD). There will no longer be a local département code as in the previous system, but only a sequential number. This number will be allocated to a vehicle for its life and will not change if the car is sold or the owner moves. The vehicle owner will have the option of adding a blue strip on the right, with the regional logo and the number of his département .
Plates, front and rear, will be black-on-white. Older plates are black-on-yellow.
Military plates
Military plates bear an 8-digit number, as well as, generally, the insignia of the branch of the military forces to which they belong:
- French Army
- French Navy
- French Air Force
- French Gendarmerie
- Délégation Générale pour l'Armement (DGA)
- Service de santé des armées (SSA) and other small services .
Civilian state administrative plates
These concern civilian vehicles owned by the national government; it does not include local governments.
They are of the form dddL nnnnM.
- ddd is a 2- or 3-digit department number.
- L is either D, R, N or E: it means that the normal circulation zone of the vehicle is the registration department and neighbouring ones, the registration region and neighbouring ones, the full national territory, or the full national territory and foreign countries. Local service vehicles are generally coded D. French National Police vehicles with police insignia are coded N.
- nnnn is a 4-digit number and M is a letter.
National police forces are registered in using this scheme while municipal police forces are registered in using the standard scheme.
See also
External links
- Site on French Number Plates
- Site on French registration plates
- A French game of numbers, From Our Own Correspondent, BBC News, 22 December 2005.
