Thus, if a vehicle changes ownership, the registration number remains unchanged.

[2] Taxis will have a light-blue number plate because they pay a different amount of tax to let people into the car legally.

The Netherlands introduced a system of vehicle registration plates on 26 April 1898 – the third country in the world to do so, after France in 1893 and Germany in 1896.

[3] A plate bearing the number 1 was issued to one J. van Dam, who purchased the first Dutch-built motorcar, which was manufactured at his own Groninger Motor-Rijtuigen Fabriek.

From 1906, a new system used the format xx-ddddd, where xx was a province code and ddddd a serial number.

The current Dutch license plate system uses black letters on a light-reflecting yellow background, although white reflecting letters on a dark-blue background are allowed for vehicles built before 1977.

Dutch license plates can be formatted as follows: This series is currently issued to semi-trailers (O).

[7] Nowadays the letters used do not include vowels, to avoid profane or obscene language.

Since January 1, 2014, the Netherlands has had an all-plastic vehicle registration in credit card format.

This registration has the same green appearance for every vehicle category, only the information on the card differs.