Friday 4 April 2008

Classic Polish cars

A Polski Fiat 125P parked by the entrance to Warszawa WKD station. One of the truly iconic cars from the communist days. Once the grandest car a Pole could aspire to. It's a shame that Poland's road licensing authorities do not allow owners to keep period white-on-black number plates. When a car changes owners, it gets a new set of plates. In the UK, a car keeps the same plates for its entire life. So we can see in this case, the car has plates issued between April 2000 and May 2006 (when the Polish flag on blue background in the top left corner was replaced by EU stars). Classic cars can get special black-on-yellow plates (tablice zabytkowe), but only with permission of the Voivodship Conservator of Historic Monuments, and after going through a huge amount of bureaucratic procedures. In the UK, all you need to do is to have a car built before 1973, and you a) pay no road tax and b) get cheap classic car insurance.

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