VehiclesDB

San Marino license plate: RSM

Retired Documented 1922 to 1986. Standard plates for car, van, truck, bus, and motorcycle, issued by Ufficio Registro Automezzi, Repubblica di San Marino. One of 19 San Marino license plates.

The earliest registration the law reaches was never a plate at all: the 1922 Regolamento required RSM and the number to be painted directly onto the front of the vehicle, with an actual plate only at the rear.

San Marino license plate, RSM (documented 1922 to 1986), sample RSM 156
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Format, years and the law

Format
RSM 999, for example RSM 156 (9 any digit)

RSM is the Republic itself, Repubblica di San Marino, followed by a plain number: with a fleet this small, the country's initials plus a counter were the whole system for sixty years.

RSM
Repubblica di San Marino (Republic of San Marino)

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 1922 to 1986; 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, and motorcycle.
Colours
Characters #0087DC Background #FFFFFF
About this plate
THE ROOT SERIES, and the root INSTRUMENT: art. 11 of the 1922 Regolamento is still the formal target of amendment a century later, DD 132/2022 art. 2 operates by replacing "Il terzo comma dell'articolo 11 del Regolamento 6 marzo 1922 n. 13". Modelled as one long series because no instrument read draws a generation boundary inside it; secondary accounts describe several plate generations between 1922 and 1986 and none of those boundaries could be dated to an instrument, so none is asserted.
About its years
START: Regolamento 6 marzo 1922 n. 13, "Norme generali sui veicoli e sulla circolazione". Recorded as an UPPER bound on the start rather than a certain origin, this is the earliest instrument reached, and whether any earlier San Marino registration existed was not established. END: the 1922 art. 11 third comma was replaced by Decreto 151/1986 art. 1.
Separators
PRINTED WITH DOTS as "R.S.M.". The same limitation as the Swiss mid-height point.
Format notes
Art. 11 prescribes "l'indicazione in azzurro su fondo bianco 'R.S.M.' ed il numero della licenza di circolazione", it names the components and gives their HEIGHT (10 cm, stroke 1 cm) but never a digit count or ceiling, across a 64-year span. A match is a shape hit and nothing more.

Legal basis and sources

  1. Regolamento 6 marzo 1922 n. 13, art. 11 third comma https://www.consigliograndeegenerale.sm/on-line/home/documento17016996.html

Before and after

San Marino license plate, Standard 1986 (1986 to 1993) Replaced by Standard 1986 1986 to 1993

This plate in your app

The series id is sm-rsm-1922. The API returns its format, validation, colours and designs with the rest of San Marino's series:

curl -s https://vehiclesdb.com/api/v1/plates/sm \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VEHICLESDB_API_KEY" \
  | jq '.series[] | select(.id == "sm-rsm-1922")'
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