Brazil license plate: PNU standard
Retired 1990 to 2020. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, trailer, and semitrailer, issued by SENATRAN (Secretaria Nacional de Trânsito), órgão máximo executivo de trânsito da União, Ministério dos Transportes; normative authority CONTRAN (Conselho Nacional de Trânsito). One of 11 Brazil license plates.
Format, years and the law
- Format
-
LLL-9999, for exampleMTX-2847(L is any letter, 9 any digit)The three letters were the state, by allocation: each DETRAN drew on a reserved block, Paraná opened the system with AAA to BEZ, São Paulo held BFA to GKI, Rio de Janeiro KMF to LVE, so the letters told you where a car was first registered.
The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.
- Years issued
- 1990 to 2020. No longer issued.
- Vehicle class
- Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, trailer, and semitrailer.
- Colours
-
Characters
#1C1C1CBackground#8F999F - Size
- 400 × 130 mm · every country's size
- About this plate
- The PNU, three letters, four digits, grey plate, black characters, a tarjeta naming the state and municipality, is the plate Brazil issued for a generation, and it is still lawfully on the road in quantity, no fleet share is claimed here because none was sourced. TWO PERIOD CAVEATS, both material. 969/2022 art. 57 lets these plates run "até o seu sucateamento", so a 2026 PNU sighting is entirely lawful; the end year is Res. 780/2019 art. 21's 31 January 2020 deadline, by which every DETRAN had to demand the Mercosul plate at first registration. What IS held verbatim is Res. 45/98 art. 1 (1998) and Res. 231/2007 art. 1 (2007), both prescribing exactly this grammar, plus Res. 45/98 art. 8 and Res. 99/99 art. 1, which ordered the national plate SUBSTITUTION completed by 31 December 1999, evidence that the rollout ran through the whole decade rather than landing in one year. 742/1989 (or of Res. 754/91) closes the single largest evidence gap in this jurisdiction.
- How numbers are issued
- Sequential inside a three-letter block allocated to each state. Res.
- Separators
- Res. 231/2007 art. 1 prescribes two GROUPS and no separator glyph; Res. 969/2022 art. 2 § 3, describing the same plate 15 years later, writes it "AAA-1111".
Legal basis and sources
- Res. 231/2007 consolidated: art. 1 (3 letters + 4 digits), art. 1 § 1 (tarjeta), art. 3 (colour follows category, combination does not change), art. 4 (series allocation delegated), Anexo items 1, 2, 4, 5.1, 6, 7, 8,... https://web.archive.org/web/20140815083608/http://www.denatran.gov.br/download/Consolidadas/cons231.pdf
- Res. 45/98 art. 1: the same grammar, seven years earlier, in the first CTB-era plate resolution https://www.gov.br/transportes/pt-br/assuntos/transito/conteudo-contran/resolucoes/resolucao045_98.zip
- art. 2 § 3 names it the 'Placa Nacional Única (PNU)' and gives the printed form 'AAA-1111'; art. 57: PNU plates run to scrapping https://www.in.gov.br/en/web/dou/-/resolucao-contran-n-969-de-20-de-junho-de-2022-410033795
- in.gov.br https://www.in.gov.br/en/web/dou/-/resolucao-n-780-de-26-de-junho-de-2019-179414765
This plate in your app
The series id is br-pnu-standard-1990. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of Brazil's series:
curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/br \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \ | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "br-pnu-standard-1990")'
- Plate image (SVG, sample serial): https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/br/br-pnu-standard-1990.svg
- Blank template, filled on your side: https://vehiclesdb.com/plates/br/br-pnu-standard-1990/template.svg
