I prefer remaining relatively anonymous. Some others seek notoriety. :-)
At each DMV there are a stack of license plates that they hand out on-site. So requesting a vanity plate of the same format would probably require them to search those stacks (across all DMVs) to pick out the plate.
You can get an 'environmental plate' issued with a sequential number though, which I believe is less than the vanity plate fee.
And there's some rules around using historic plates on historic vehicles.
grep "q[a-z]*z[a-z]*v" words
`Qazvin` is apparently a city in Iran
Except China and India where 8 should be enough.
I am sure there are reasons but I feel that we overcomplicate.
I first lived in California during the waning days of the 1XYZ123 plates and while I occasionally saw older cars with 123ABC plates, I never knew the order those were issued.
with a trailing 1-9, it will likely be the same. You have a preview with commercial plates which were 1A12345 and are now 12345A1
(edit: linked to two pages with lots of good info)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...
[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/vehicle-industry-regi...
The function of knowing whether a car is licensed/registered can be accomplished without an ID number (it's not like the stickers they use to show tag expiration have ID numbers).
Similarly, ID'ing a car can now be done with some kind of air-tag like device that could also be privacy protecting.
That system would be cool if it worked, but it would be very complicated to implement.
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1. They do, however for specialty plates, have plates which have two letters at the end, usually stacked vertically on the right side of the plate, so, e.g., a stacked SD for people with the duck environmental plate.
It was BBB000 GP to ZZZ999 GP skipping vowels. The replacement scheme is BB00BB GP to ZZ00ZZ GP again skipping vowels.
I’m presently on holiday in a different province which used to have a scheme “like N<single letter for town> #####” but I see now they use the same current scheme as Gauteng except instead of being suffixed with GP (for Gauteng Province), they have ZN (for Kwazulu Natal).
ryan-duve•9mo ago
Does anyone know why they care about this structure? Naively, there are 36^7 (minus edge cases) combinations available, which will always be sufficient.
dekhn•9mo ago
crdrost•9mo ago
In addition, all-numbers-plates, I believe, are reserved by California exempt plates (emergency vehicles, police), and vanity plates are absolutely a thing, much more likely to start and/or end on a letter, so that's why you see numbers at the beginning and end. Like you can kinda see “6EIC023” and say “oh yeah my car looks like an ad for Geico” but because the start and end are numbers it doesn't occur to most people.
blacksmith_tb•9mo ago
CobaltFire•9mo ago
That’s the primary way you can differentiate them at a glance from the DP (Disabled Person) plates.
Just a little odd fact; I know you meant the more standard plates.
jeffbee•9mo ago
whartung•9mo ago
I may be wrong, but that’s what get when I see them.
DidYaWipe•9mo ago
This is not a shock. After moving here, I find that CA's highly-touted "car culture" is pretty retrograde compared to other major metro areas.
DidYaWipe•9mo ago
sedev•9mo ago