January 2026. The Three Wise Men of the East have brought a breakdown to your car. You step aside, leave the vehicle, put on your vest and get to work. First, put the emergency triangles. The second thing, notify the insurance and/or emergency services.
The third thing, wait for the Civil Guard agent to confirm that we have done everything wrong.
And since January 1, 2026, emergency triangles become prohibited. Instead it will be mandatory to have a light V-16a beacon that will serve to alert other drivers from the roof of our car and notify the DGT that we have had a problem.
If we do not act correctly, we expose ourselves to more than one fine.
How to act with the new V-16 beacons
The first thing to be clear about is that the new V-16 beacons do not only replace the emergency triangles. From now on, using the latter will be prohibited and placing them on the road may be punished with a fine of 80 euroswhich is related to not correctly signaling that there is an obstacle on the road.
Therefore, before leaving home we will be obliged with the new year to have one of these new devices. What should we know about them? Here we leave you with the most basic but You can check all the requirements in this link:
- They must appear as approved in the DGT list (that guarantees that it meets the technical requirements)
- They must have batteries and an active battery
- Thinking about the future, they cannot be more than 12 years old (minimum time that the data connection must be guaranteed) unless an extension of this period is indicated on the device of the article itself.
Once we are sure that we have the correct V-16 beacon, we must keep it in the glove compartment of the car. This is important because if we keep it in the trunk we will have to get out of the vehicle and that is, exactly, one of the reasons that the DGT alleges to activate these new warning lights.
Therefore, if we have a breakdown, we must pull over and turn on the emergency lights. Then, we activate the beacon and putting your hand out the window of the car we place it on the roof. Once this is done, we have two options. If there is space to leave the vehicle and go to a safe place off the road surface, we should go there. Always with reflective vests on. If said space does not exist, from 2023 It is mandatory to wait for assistance from inside the vehicle with seat belts fastened.
When we activate light V-16, the beacon should activate connectivity and contact the DGT 3.0 platform sending the coordinates of our position, this way it will be instantly verified that there is an incident on the road. This serves to activate the nearby light panels alerting that there is an incident on the road. In addition, connected vehicles traveling on that same road will receive a message in their browsers using the signal V-27 (a red triangle with an exclamation mark inside and three curved lines on the right side as a reminder of “connectivity”).
This does not mean that emergency services are activated automatically. Passengers are responsible for notifying the insurance if the car must be towed and the emergency services, such as the Civil Guard, to alert them of what happened and facilitate the removal of the vehicle. Now we just have to wait.
Of course, it must be taken into account that approved beacons guarantee emergency light flashing for a minimum of 30 minutes. From there, we will be left without an element that alerts us to our presence, beyond the vehicle’s emergency lights. An obvious solution is to buy a beacon with batteries and replace them when they stop working, but we must remember to carry this element in our car.
Photo | Help Flash
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