GC is a Mazda car platform, but weirdly, the last one was manufactured in '87.
Was it on a Mazda?
mmm
I agree, “8Y8” could well be for “88.”
Barring some neo-Nazi reference (they apparently use 88 with some frequency), my guess would be that GC is the owner’s initials, and other variants (88GC, GC88) were already taken.
Is it necessary a personalized number? I.e. are US vanity license plates visually distinct (apart from the license number, obviously) from those with a randomly assigned license number?
88 Gamers Club is an E-sports league.
Depends on the state.
No, it was a pickup truck.
J.
That was my first guess, too. I guessed that DMV’s might prohibit “88” because of the Nazi reference and that they had to go with “8Y8” to get past the censor. I couldn’t think of what “GC” might mean in this context.
J.
Google turned up someone saying — of Super Smash? — that “Anybody is free to join whenever I open an arena! Arena opens if somebody says they want to play Arena Code: 8Y8GC”.
When I last applied for a personalized plate, the application for that state had a short list of letter-number patterns they would not approve. Which patterns matched the ones they’d recently used, were then using, and two patterns that I suspect they intended to use next when the current pattern was used up.
It’s also worth pointing out that for regular plates, which plate number you get is random. But they’re not made randomly. They just make them all in order from e.g. AAA 000 to AAA 001 to AAA 999 to AAB 000, etc., right on through to ZZZ 999.
IOW, you’re drawing the top card from an unshuffled deck, not a card at random from a shuffled deck. Nor just rolling some dice and getting whatever letters / numbers come up on top of the dice.
From your POV there’s no meaningful difference between these three methods. From theirs it means they need to ensure nobody is issued a personalized plate that would interfere with the next deck they’re going to make en masse then deal out to the public as needed.
Okay , fellow Dopers…let’s play a game!!!
@Lancia , come on, give us a hint so we can get started!
Tell us approx. which scene from Life of Brian you chose, and give us a clue about your plate,(maybe ,say, the first letter).
Then we Dopers, the smartest people on earth, will play "Guess Lancia’s license plate*.
The winner gets bragging rights…
I’ll play first … I’ll go with some combination of JPF & PFJ. So JPF PFJ or PFJ JPF. If I’m only allowed one entry, the former is my first choice.
Maybe NTDDYT or is “I’m not dead, yet!” from a different Monty Python?
A buddy of mine was trying to guess and the only clue I would give him is to remind him I’m an English teacher.
I will say it’s from the first half of the movie.
That’s from Holy Grail.
Something from the scene where the centurion corrects the grammar?
I’m on my phone, so looking up details is a pain.
Then I’m gonna guess that it’s the scene where he writes “Roman people they are going house”, and the guard corrects it to “Romans go home”
But how you make a 6-letter license plate out of that, I dunno.
.
.
(by the way, for you Yanks who never studied Latin in grade school: that scene (in which the centurion acts just like a strict British schoolmaster hovering over a terrified boy) is very realistic.)
Latin instructors on this side of the pond have the same reputation. Must be the language.
My guess is SPLTTR
As Kenobi_65 said, it depends on the state.
In Arizona we started out long ago with 3 letters, 3 numbers then there were 3 numbers, 3 letters, then 3 letters, 4 numbers. For some reason that was abandoned entirely so now if there is a pattern, it is not readily apparent.
Plates can be six digits or seven and are a mix of letters and numbers, although I’ve not seen more than two numbers, the number(s) can be anywhere in the sequence, and the letters are at random. Why the change was made is unclear because it was about the time DAA1234 would have been issued and at the rate they were going through the combos, it would have easily been 20 years before they had to come up with something else.
Of course, this is the state that has more than 70 different license plates, so many even the cops can’t keep track of them all. Consequently a law was passed making frames that obscure the word ARIZONA at the top illegal, making most of the ones you can buy useless.
I like this !!!
And it just occurred to me that a Python fan could create an even funnier plate, and probably get away with it (in America, probably not in England): BIGGUS
But neither of these really fits our clue that Lancia is an English teacher.
Well, maybe he’s still sore about the great vowel shift.
Ninja’d by an hour. I vote for BIGGUS.
There’s a guy who lives around here who had one that says COVFEFE. Saw one in San Jose, Costa Rica, that said SU MADRE; got a pic of it someplace.
Best one I ever saw was when Indiana had a speciality plate for some kind of children’s charity that said KIDS FIRST across the bottom. Someone got this specialty plate as a vanity as well, and so above KIDS FIRST, it said EAT THE.
I didn’t see the last one in the wild, though-- saw a pic of it in a magazine-- but I know the KIDS FIRST plate really exists-- plenty of people had it.