VehiclesDB

France license plate: FNI

Retired Documented 1984 to 2009. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, moped, trailer, semitrailer, tractor, and machine, issued by Ministère de l'intérieur. One of 17 France license plates.

France license plate, FNI (documented 1984 to 2009), sample 242 DE 99
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Format, years and the law

Format
999 LL 99, for example 242 DE 99 (L is any letter, 9 any digit)

Read it from the right: the last two digits are the département where the car was registered, 75 was Paris, and moving house meant a new number. Everything before is that département's own counter, digits climbing to 999 before the letters tick over.

The format above is broad: a registration that fits it has the right shape, which does not show that this series issued it.

Years issued
Documented 1984 to 2009; the format is likely older than the first year documented. No longer issued.
Vehicle class
Standard: the default series issued to private road vehicles. Issued for car, van, truck, bus, motorcycle, moped, trailer, semitrailer, tractor, and machine.
Colours
Characters #000000 Background #FFFFFF
About this plate
THE FNI, France's plate for two human generations, and the one that actually decodes. None of them is modelled, deliberately.
How the region is encoded
GENUINELY GEOGRAPHIC, and the reason this series matters. Under the 1984 arrêté the certificat was issued "soit par la préfecture du département du domicile du propriétaire" (art. 2) and a change of département was a mutation requiring a new certificate (art. 10 A/B), so the trailing département group told you where the vehicle was kept, and it CHANGED when the owner moved.

Legal basis and sources

  1. arrêté du 5 novembre 1984 relatif à l'immatriculation des véhicules; art. 1 (the series: normales, TT and IT, diplomatic CMD/CD/C/K, W, WW including the export series WAL à WZL and WAE à WZE, FFECSA and DF;... https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/LEGITEXT000006075077
  2. This citation evidences the GAP, not the format. https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000006889019
  3. arrêté (1) art. 19 II-III: the 1984 arrêté continues to apply to vehicles without a definitive number until 31 December 2009 at the latest, and such vehicles may keep circulating under their old number until a... https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/article_lc/LEGIARTI000042128428
  4. arrêté du 23 mars 2009: SIV from 15 April 2009; the former rules run on for already-registered vehicles until 14 October 2009 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000020446205
  5. the French administration's own plate page, giving the old FNI format as '123 AB 45' and the SIV as 'AB-123-CD' https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F20319

Before and after

France license plate, SIV standard (2009 to today) Replaced by SIV standard 2009 to today

This plate in your app

The series id is fr-fni-1984. 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-fni-1984")'
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