Richard Schooling’s Blog: 15 October 2007

Numbers game

If international fleet management is about acting global and thinking local, number plates definitely come into the second category.

Some countries’ systems link licence plates to cars; others to drivers. In parts of Europe, moving house to another area entails interminable queuing and form-filling to re-register your vehicle.

Yet even the most time-consuming systems are usually treated by the countries involved as a vital part of their national identity.

So I was surprised to read that France will drop its 50-year-old system of regionalised licence numbers in 2009. From then on, you won’t be able to tell where a vehicle is currently registered simply by reading the last two digits on a number plate. Seventy-five will no longer mean Paris, for example, or 56 central Brittany.

This will save French vehicle owners countless hours of paperwork. But in a country that prides itself on strong regional identities, the move is far from universally popular. For instance, it’s said that to keep the peace in the Herault region where wild mushrooms are highly prized by protective locals, police sometimes prevent ‘outside’ mushroomers, whose cars don’t have a regional 34 plate, from attempting to join the cuillette .

According to The Times, the French move is intended to cut bureaucracy and is also in line with EU ambitions for a universal European vehicle identification system.

As the UK switched to a regional identity for number plates in 2001, it may be a long time before pan-European fleet operators can enjoy the luxury of single system that stretches from Ballykissangel to Belgrade.

All is not entirely lost for the French. From 2009, they can still show a département number in a blue flash on their new number plates.

So, if you are ever run-into by a French car with a 976 number plate, you can console yourself with the thought that you are either very unlucky indeed, or very well travelled, because 976 is the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.