Former Scheme
Until 2009, the plate format bore 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 was 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 identifier consisted of 3 digits (in the series 971 to 978), the first two digits often being stacked to save space.
Vehicle owners had to re-register their vehicle if they relocated 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 at local level.
A side effect of the vehicle tax system was that many corporations registered their vehicles in departments, such as Oise (60), with lower rates. Regulations aimed at preventing such schemes were passed in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Vehicle Registration Plates Of France
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