A follow up article suggests motorcycles will be banned, as will motorhomes. It's not just Chinese motorcycles and motorhomes that will be banned, although the regulations are being put in place specifically to address the issue of Chinese vehicles travelling to Thailand as they constitute the vast majority of non-regional vehicles. During the Chinese New Year, in many parts of Thailand there were far more Chinese vehicles than those registered in neighboring countries, which is rather strange given that Thailand and China do not share an agreement on cross border traffic. Only in places like Udon Thani would one have spotted more Lao vehicles than Chinese ones, but in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai and even all the way down to Pattaya and Phuket, dozens (or more) Chinese vehicles could have been spotted meanwhile not a single Lao or Malaysian vehicle might have been seen.
See this article for further information:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/business...ts-face-strict-curbs-on-driving-into-thailand
Other Thai language articles published around the middle of this month also seem to confirm the following additional rules:
Traffic orientation to take place at the Department of Land Transport of the border province entered. Orientation will take 1 hour. Will need to apply for a temporary Thai driver's licence if from a country that is not party to the 1949 UN convention on international motor traffic (China is one such country).
There will be a new database linking customs, immigration and the Land Transport Department that will allow officials to check how long a foreign vehicle has been in Thailand. If any (major) traffic rules are broken, the customs authorities can revoke driving permission and/or consider whether to allow the vehicle back into Thailand in future.
Entry will be limited to 30 days per time, with 60 days per year being the maximum. I'm not sure if an extension of stay will be allowed or if it's exactly as the wording: 30 days per entry but a second entry of 30 days will be permitted, or 30 days initially, with a second 30 day extension possible as long as the vehicle does not spend more than 60 days in the country per year.
This will likely mean the end of the up to 6 month extensions available through customs at Khlong Toei. Also, I can imagine any extension would have to go through a local tour operator and can't be done by the owner or driver of the vehicle themselves anymore (though this has not been addressed specifically).
Also, travel will be restricted to the border province entered, for example, Chiang Rai. If wanting to travel further, must go through a Thai based tour operator (presumably this means going with a guide) or must hire a car/use public transport.
No more self-driven convoys without a guide/escort. All convoys of more than 3 vehicles I think it is will require a guide and police escort.
The head of the traffic police in Bangkok additionally warned that Chinese (and other foreign) registrations found driving inside Bangkok will have their vehicles seized, fined 10,000 Baht and be placed on a tow truck to the driven to the border for export. Not sure if or when this regulation would enter into force, but the police wants to control the already large numbers of vehicles on Bangkok roads and Chinese cars/campervans that were spotted in the Khao San road/Wat Phra Kaew area last month during Chinese New Year, caused traffic jams, were parked illegally not to mention some of them drove the wrong way onto the expressway, causing major traffic woes.
I'm glad that Chinese vehicles will soon be effectively banished from Thai roads - they've abused the easy entry privileges for too long and it was only going to be a matter of time before this "friendly invasion" of blue plates would be stopped. I mean, look at the statistics - in 2013 around 1700 Chinese plates entered Thailand at Chiang Khong, by 2014 it became 4800 or so and then last year it almost doubled to 9200. In the first two months of this year a whopping 6000 odd Chinese plates entered Thailand. And that's not including Nong Khai, where although a much smaller number entered, but almost every time I've been crossing there since late 2014 (a total of at least 11 times, sometimes one way sometimes in both directions on the same trip) I would see at least one or two Chinese registrations, sometimes as many as 5 crossing at once. Only when crossing very late would I not see any Chinese registrations. If the authorities didn't do something, there would have been more accidents and in just 2-3 years or so, one could have conceivably imagined more Chinese vehicles on the roads in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai during holiday periods, than local vehicles and that's just not sustainable given they don't pay road tax for the wear and tear they put on Thai roads.
Meanwhile Thai cars need to deposit 50,000 Yuan (around 270,000 Baht) plus give up to 3 months advance notice to drive in China (15 days for Sipsongbanna, 30 days for Kunming and Yunnan), pay an additional 15,000 Baht or so in other fees for permits, buy a 1st class insurance policy and also have a guide with them the whole time they are in China. Which rules out almost all Thai drivers except those travelling in a caravan, and even then most stick to Yunnan unless they're part of a promotional team such as when Isuzu drove their new 1.9 liter D-Maxes to northern China to show how fuel efficient they were, but as a major car manufacturer they could afford to pay all these fees; individual travelers from Thailand or expats based in Thailand generally can't (not to mention how crazy it is to be asked for a deposit that is about 1/3 to 1/2 the value of an average car!)
Only seems reasonable that the Thais would wake up to this hypocrisy and stop the potential carnage, additional pollution not to mention traffic jams, and shear annoyance that so many of us have when driving on local roads which we have to pay thousands of Baht per year in annual road tax for (depending on the type of vehicle we're driving), but then we are confronted with loads of freeloading blue plates.
