The Association of Motorcycle Importers and Distributors (AIDMM) requests the Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forests (MMAP) and the Environmental Fund Administration (AFM) to reallocate the amount of 15 million lei from the budget line intended for thermal and hybrid vehicles to the motorcycle category, within the Rabla 2026 subsidy program. Previously, market sources told Energynomics that the budget will run out in a few minutes, and the end user must be “quick” and have all the documents prepared in the system on July 20 at 10:00 to get a subsidy, according to the experience of previous years.
“On July 10 (2026, editor’s note) we officially warned that the motorcycle budget would run out in the first minutes. It ran out in nine. We are not asking for extra money from the budget – we are asking for an allocation correction where there is demand and there is no supply. The reallocation of 15 million lei from the thermal line means 9% of the initial allocation of that line and about a fifth of the amount left unspent, but for the motorcycle category it means doubling the program and over a thousand more old vehicles taken out of circulation. A program that closes in nine minutes is not a program, it is a lottery. The state now has the opportunity to transform an image success into a real environmental result, through a simple administrative decision that does not affect any car buyer. We are ready to present the AFM with the complete data of our members regarding the unsatisfied demand,” said Andrei Sebastian Ivan, the representative of AIDMM, in a press release quoted by Agerpres.
The problems with the Rabla program include an extremely thick bureaucracy and prior approvals from other state institutions, such as ANAF.
According to the cited source, the financing lines for passenger cars still have a cumulative total of almost 97 million lei available.
“The figures from the opening of the session on July 20 are eloquent. The 15 million lei budget allocated to motorcycles was exhausted in nine minutes, with 1,293 files submitted. At 10:09, the AFM application already displayed a negative balance. In the same interval, Romanians submitted over 11,000 files across all categories, confirming the massive interest in the program. Three days later, on July 23, the picture is still deeply unbalanced: the line dedicated to thermal and hybrid vehicles still has 68.3 million lei available out of the 165 million allocation, and the line dedicated to electric cars and plug-in hybrids 28.4 million out of 120 million. After the peak in the first hour, when the thermal line absorbed 72.7 million lei, the pace noticeably slowed down – in the following three days, only about 24 million were committed. For motorcycles, on the other hand, over a “A thousand citizens with prepared files were left out of the program, after only 9 minutes,” the profile association mentions.
AIDMM representatives specify that the mechanism would not be a first: in 2025, the exhaustion of funds in 13 minutes at the session on September 30, 2025 was followed by the supplement and redistribution of the budget, and the program continued in good conditions for all categories.
“The efficiency argument remains unchanged. The motorcycle eco-ticket – 10,000 lei for thermal engines, 15,000 lei for electric – is the lowest in the program, so that each lei reallocated here takes more polluting vehicles out of use than on any other line. The demand is, moreover, structural, not cyclical: according to RAR data, the motorcycle market increased by 54% between January and May 2026 compared to the same period last year, from 3,444 to 5,326 registered vehicles,” claims AIDMM.
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