Barcelona is one of the cities with the most motorcycles per inhabitant in Europe, and many locals have started on the road with those 49cc mopeds that do not exceed 50 km / h. but manage to take you to any corner of the city obviously, with the consequent pollution. The City Council has now proposed to fight against these fumes, and therefore seeks that these mopeds disappear definitively to make way for electric silence.
If you are one of those who still keeps a 49cc gasoline moped in the garage, this will interest you: Barcelona will pay you 600 euros to switch to electric.
Mayor Jaume Collboni, who led by example by arriving at the announcement on two electric wheels, has presented this plan that seeks to fill an important gap in state subsidies. And is that, until now, the famous Moves Plan gave you up to 1,300 euros for a big bike, but totally left out small mopeds (those with yellow license plates). Now, Barcelona wants to correct that.
What the aids consist of and who can ask for them.
The plan is simple but has fine print . As of March 1, 2026, anyone registered in Barcelona will be able to apply for this direct aid of 600 euros. The total budget is 15 million euros, with an eye on renewing up to 20,000 vehicles between now and 2030.
But be careful, because there are strict conditions to avoid rogue traders:
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Moped for moped: It is not worth taking advantage of the aid to buy a large displacement motorcycle or an electric bike. The change must be from a combustion moped to an equivalent electric moped.
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Scrapping: To get paid, you will have to hand in your old motorcycle. You can take it to an authorized center or leave it at the municipal depot, which will take care of the procedure free of charge. The objective is to “clean” the census, not to expand it.
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No retroactive nature: Only purchase invoices issued after the start date of the call will be used.
According to municipal data, there are currently some 32,000 mopeds registered in the city, of which 24,000 are combustion engines. The curious thing is that many of them do not even circulate; they accumulate dust in private parking lots. With this measure, the consistory hopes that these owners will take the definitive step towards change or deregistration.
More interchangeable batteries on the street
It’s not all about buying the bike; you also have to know where to “refuel”. One of the big brakes on electric mobility is the fear of running out of battery or not having a plug handy. To solve this, the City Council will also inject three million euros to create abattery swapping network.
If you have seen the sharing scooters like those of Acciona or the private ones of Silence, you will be familiar with the system: you arrive at a station, take out your dead battery and exchange it for a charged one in a matter of seconds. The idea is to add 64 new stations (in public and private parking lots and gas stations) to the 32 that already exist.
This strategy not only seeks to reduce CO2 emissions in the context of the tightening of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ), but also to attack another of the great enemies of Barcelona’s quality of life: noise pollution. The ultimate goal is ambitious: that by 2030 Barcelona’s moped fleet will be 100% electric.