Owners of hybrid vehicles, or those with a combustion system, and that are circulating with green plates must return them and arrange for the change. This is because this type of license plate can only be carried by 100% electric vehicles.
Instead, they must carry the plates used by the rest of the Costa Rican vehicle fleet. This was reported by the Road Safety Council (Cosevi) in a letter sent to the technical review company Dekra on January 25, 2024.
Given several doubts presented to Cosevi, this council reported that if the vehicles are already registered as electric but in their configuration they have some type of combustion (hybrids), either to move it or to charge the battery, the owner must make the change.The council reported that it is the responsibility of the vehicle owner to process the change before the National Registry.
Cosevi orders Dekra to detect defects
On the other hand, Cosevi ordered Dekra that when these vehicles arrive for inspection with a green plate, they will be assigned a defect, in this case the non-match or absence of some data in the identification documents. Dekra must also note in the vehicle inspection that the license plate does not match the car category.
If the vehicle is new, the inspection staff must confirm that, in fact, the car is 100% electric. If it is imported as such but it is not, you must also make the corresponding annotation, which would put at risk obtaining the vehicle inspection sticker.
“This technical instruction is mandatory and immediate compliance in order to prevent the cases to be analyzed from continuing to grow and also guarantee giving formal and standardized treatment to the vehicles to which the instruction applies,” Cosevi said in the CSV-DP letter. -FTV-0013-2024.
The document is signed by the person in charge A.I. of the Technical Unit for Inspection and Project Management, José Delgado and the Project Director of Cosevi, Roy Rojas.
“Our interest is that the law is respected,” says the association
The executive director of the Costa Rican Association of Electric Mobility (Asomove), Silvia Rojas, commented to this medium that they filed some of the consultations on this issue in 2023, as several cars were driving on the street with muffles, emanating smoke and with a green plate.It points out that with this technical criterion of Cosevi, the scope of Law 9518 Incentives and promotion for electric transportation is respected.
“Our interest is that the law is respected. It is a law of incentives and promotion solely and exclusively for zero-emission vehicles: that do not have a muffle, that do not use gasoline, that do not emit smoke, that have no emissions, that do not pollute,” Rojas commented.
Rojas explained that with this order sent to Dekra, the responsibility of reviewing the details of the cars falls on this company, which is in charge of carrying out vehicle inspections.It also points out that in the next technical reviews this irregularity will be classified as a serious failure and could even mean fines from the Traffic Police.
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Guillermo Agudelo
