An ordinary registration plate in Sweden usually has a white background and black characters, but the Swedish Transport Agency also issues plates with other color combinations for special purposes.
For example, you may come across a license plate with a yellow, blue, green or orange background in traffic. There are also license plates that are red with white characters.
Read more: How fast can you drive a trailer? Here is the answer
Who can use a blue license plate?
A fairly common sight on Swedish roads, at least in and around Stockholm, are cars equipped with blue license plates with black characters.
These are plates for embassy vehicles, i.e. vehicles that are registered at another country’s embassy. That license plates on diplomatic cars are blue is an international standard.
Registration numbers on diplomatic plates do not follow the same standard as other Swedish registration numbers, but consist of two letters followed by three numbers and another letter.
The registration number is linked to the embassy in question and not to the car, and the car’s actual registration number must be displayed as a sticker on one of the car’s windows.
Read more: What does a green license plate mean? Here is the answer
Contains code for the diplomat’s country and status
Before 1973, Swedish license plates contained information about where in the country a particular vehicle came from, but this is no longer the case.
Mission vehicle plates, however, have a lot to say. The last letter of the registration number indicates, for example, the status of the diplomat who owns the car.
If you see, for example, a blue license plate with an “A” as the last letter, you know for example that it is the ambassador’s car that is out and about, while for example “C” stands for diplomat and “G” stands for consular officer.
The first two letters of the registration number show which country’s embassy the vehicle belongs to, as each country has its own combination of two letters.
For example, “BL” stands for France, while “BN” stands for Greece and “AA” stands for South Africa. The license plate in the picture above is on the Ambassador’s Namibia car.
Read more: Electric cars from Volvo and Volkswagen flop in range tests
Read more: Gasoline is cheap in Sweden – relative to the rest of Western Europe