VehiclesDB

France license plate: Collection

Issued today 2009 to today. Historic plates for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, trailer, tractor, and machine, issued by Ministère de l'intérieur. One of 17 France license plates.

For vehicles over 30 years old with collector status: black like the pre-1993 plates, and the only French series bare of both blue bands.

France license plate, Collection (2009 to today), sample OP-586-KM
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Format, years and the law

Format
LL-999-LL, for example OP-586-KM (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

No special series hides here: a collection car keeps an ordinary AA-123-AA drawn from the same national counter, the black plate changes the costume, never the number.

The format above follows the issuing rules: a registration that fits it is one this series could have issued.

Years issued
2009 to today. Still issued.
Vehicle class
Historic: vintage/oldtimer regimes (German H, ES historico). Issued for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, trailer, tractor, and machine.
Colours
Characters #FFFFFF Background #000000
Size
520 × 110 mm · every country's size
About this plate
VÉHICULE DE COLLECTION, white on black, optional, and stripped of both blue bands. Worth stating plainly for the encyclopedia: France did not revive a historic FORMAT (contrast the Dutch dark-blue regime, which is tied to sidecode 1/2/3 registrations); a French collection vehicle carries an ordinary modern AA-123-AA number, merely printed white on black. The black plate is also the only French design whose absence of an EU band is itself sourced rather than inferred.

Legal basis and sources

  1. annexe 7 item 3: 'Véhicules de collection, Le numéro d'immatriculation peut être reproduit sur chaque plaque d'immatriculation en caractères blancs sur fond noir.' https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000052974050
  2. art. 8 last paragraph (no European symbol) and art. 9 last paragraph (no identifiant territorial) for collection plates https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000020237128
  3. art. 4: the 'véhicule de collection' usage and its conditions, referring to art. R. 311-1 6.3 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000049860467

This plate in your app

The series id is fr-collection. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of France's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/fr \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "fr-collection")'
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