If you drive a car in Cairo, you need an Egyptian license plate. But a number of road users also attach a German license plate to their vehicle. Why? That explains several of the number plate fans.
Salim Warda has a lot on offer in his car accessories shop: windscreen wiper blades, caps for tank openings or lithium button cell batteries. Between all the goods from the great realm of motor vehicles, there are also a few number plates hanging on a wall of shelves that look familiar to the German eye: on the left a blue bar with a “D” below the circle of stars for the European Union. Then the letters “ME” for Mettmann, district in North Rhine-Westphalia in the administrative district of Düsseldorf.
Warda is neither a license plate collector nor was Mettmann incorporated into the greater Cairo area. In the Egyptian capital, the German license plates are more of an accessory, a chic extra to beautify your own car. You can see German license plates on taxis, vans or minibuses. In Cairo’s sea of ??tin, one can often be spotted one a minute. “Demand is high, people like it,” says Warda. A German license plate is used for decoration, whether on a BMW or a Mitsubishi.
There are stacks of things at Al-Taufikaija, Cairo’s market for new and used car parts. “GI” (Giessen) and “HR” (Homberg/Hessen) are on offer, as are “EIC” (Eichsfeld/Thuringia), “KUS” (Kusel/Rhineland-Palatinate), “B” (Berlin) or “BN” (Bonn). Car owners usually mount the license plates below or next to the Egyptian ones, so that the blue bar appears next to the Arabic numerals and letters. “Stylish,” is how a taxi driver describes the practice.
Egyptian traffic cops tolerate German car decorations as long as the local number plate can be seen correctly. From a German point of view, there are no concerns as long as the vehicle previously registered in Germany has been deregistered, says spokesman Stephan Immen from the Federal Motor Vehicle Office in Flensburg. With this step, the license plate is devalued and loses its validity. Whether it ends up in the garbage can, on Ebay or on the streets of Cairo is of “relatively little relevance” to the authorities.
For Aiman ??Gab from Giseh, who has been driving a taxi for 16 years and uses a German number himself, there is more to it than that. “The Germans are geniuses. I admire them. They are very well organized and passionate about their work.” One of the license plate dealers describes it similarly: “Egyptians love German cars and Germany in general.” Occasionally an “F” (France) or an “E” (Spain) pops up in traffic, but the “D” seems particularly common.
Egyptian and even Chinese manufacturers are now also making money from the trend with counterfeits. Salim Warda’s Mettmann license plate “ME-4444” has an (obviously false) TÜV sticker, a seal from the Hohenlohe district district office in Baden-Württemberg – and it comes from China. The “D” and the EU stars can also be found on Egyptian imitations, but the font and colors clearly deviate from the originals. A counterfeit sign from China costs 25 pounds (1.30 euros), an old German original around 75 pounds (3.90 euros). It is not always possible to trace exactly how the signs get from Germany to Cairo.
Some of them would end up in boxes at road traffic authorities, says car recycler Hagen Hamm. “One or the other reaches in there.” According to ADAC, around 160,000 license plates are stolen in Germany every year. It cannot be ruled out that some of these will go abroad at the raw material price of aluminum. Kai Berkau from the car service provider PS Team says: “There is no legal way to buy old license plates.” The fact that the Egyptians attach the number plates to cars from Asian manufacturers, which are sometimes dented, seems to be secondary to the trend. “It’s about showing off,” says Salim Warda. “No one cares if he really drives a Mercedes.”
