New blue plates, but... who is required to use them?

Little by little they are being introduced to a greater extent, depending mainly on the size of the city, but you will surely have come across numerous taxis that now use blue-background number plates. As you can imagine, this is not an arbitrary decision; it is a measure adopted after the approval of a Ministerial Order stipulating that these vehicles must use that number plate.

Specifically, it is applied through Ministerial Order PCI/810/2018, which states that all taxis and private hire vehicles with driver of up to nine seats, mostly known as VTC, will be required to display a rear number plate with a blue background and white numbers and letters, while the front number plate remains as we have always known it.

Under this regulation, vehicles registered after 31 July must already comply with this identification measure, while vehicles registered before that date will have up to one year to adapt to this regulation. This measure, which is also already applied in other European Union countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands, aims to make it easier for users to identify this type of vehicle, thus preventing us from unknowingly using so-called “pirate taxis”.

This type of plate thus joins the usual ones we use on our private vehicles, in addition to the rest of the special plates we also use in Spain:

• Provisional green-background plates: These plates are requested so that vehicles of foreign origin, whether new or simply being transferred, can circulate in our country while the documentation enabling them to circulate fully legally on our roads is being processed.

• Provisional red-background plates: This type of plate is used by vehicles that are circulating while receiving their ordinary registration; that are temporarily deregistered due to a sales process; or by vehicles used for test drives by potential buyers.

• Historic vehicle plate: This may be requested for any vehicle classified as classic or collectible, provided it is more than 30 years old (until this year the age requirement was 25 years), thereby obtaining a series of advantages that may depend on the municipality where it is applied for.

• Tourist plate: These plates have been used since 1934, mainly to encourage the purchase of vehicles in our country by non-resident persons, with the consequent benefits that this entailed, but their limited acceptance has led to their repeal.

• Diplomatic plates: As their name indicates, these plates are used on vehicles of senior civil servants, diplomats or consuls. These plates change their two initial letters depending on the body they belong to: CD (Diplomatic Corps), CC (Consular Offices), OI (International Organisations), TA (Technical-administrative staff).