OK, you were talking about computerised scanning in particular, pardon me. But don’t they suffer from similar limitations to human vision? I know when I have tried to OCR text it helps a lot if it is high contrast. Coloured text on coloured background leads to more mistakes.
The technology is already here. An officer can drive through a parking lot and scan all the license plates on the fly. This information is run through a database looking for stolen cars or other illegal activity.
The wavelengths our eyes work in are not adjustable, those of plates reflections and cameras are. You can have, for example, plates whose busy background makes it difficult for a human to distinguish a B from an 8, but which to a camera that reads the UV or IR beyond the water mountains* look like completely-non-reflective lettering on a highly-reflective background.
- Both near-UV and near-IR have huge peaks if water is present. They’re affectionately referred to as the water “mountains”, and a bitch to get rid of when doing spectrometry.
The logical solution is to move to a state that doesn’t use front plates! 
Repo men do this as well. The drive around building data bases by driving around scanning all the license plates. They build up data bases of where cars are generally found and then if one of them comes up needing to be repossessed they know where to find the car. This article says there are databases for about 1/2 the cars on the road in the US.
Think what you wish. I disagree. In real life situations (such as a driver speeding away from a hit and run, at dusk), the readability conditions of the plate may be less than ideal for even a person with perfect eyesight. It makes perfect sense to me to aim for maximum human readability.
Like I said, these things are perceptions (in both directions). Signs with embossed metal lettering on a coloured background remind me of stuff like this: http://img.auctiva.com/imgdata/4/6/8/8/3/1/webimg/553371240_tp.jpg
YMMV.
This is so very, very wrong. At least for my rural state (South Dakota). Up until quite recently when they started putting machines in certain private business where you can renew your registration, all motor vehicle stuff was done at the county courthouse. Since there are 66 counties and 64 county seats (as two counties are unorganized), you do not have to go to the capital city or the largest city in the state. As a matter of fact, up until quite recently, you could go to any county seat in the state to renew, you didn’t have to go to the county seat of your resident county. So this ‘drive for 4 hours’ malarkey is simply not true. Also, nothing is done by a third-party contractor.
As far as new/used car dealer. They don’t issue/renew plates, you have to take your wad of paperwork to the county courthouse to get that done. Some counties do have remote offices in other cities in the county but they are not third-party. For driver’s licenses, in most counties it is done at the county courthouse except for some of the larger cities have a separate office to do that. These are also not third-party but are run by the state.
Up until 2008, South Dakota was a plate with car state, now we are a plate with owner state.
Our plates are usually replaced on a 5 year cycle, except one time when they were changed a little bit early and in mid-year because the police complained about readability. This site has examples of the bad one and the new one (scroll down to the second to last ones from the bottom).
Not much to add and forgive me if this has been mentioned, but in the UK, some of the the numbers and letters on the plate denote the year the car was registered and the location of registration. The remainder of the numbers are unique to that particular car.
So for example, it is very easy to tell (instantly in fact) that a car is a 2004 model and a little more digging will reveal that it was registered in say…Coventry. This has always been the case and is why the plate stays with the car.
The number/letter system has changed now but my dad’s old Mini was UGT 371M. The M denoted 1973/4 and the UG denoted the area of registration which was Leeds.
I can remember at least 7 plates that belonged to either myself or my family. The plate becomes the identity of the car.
Thanks for the details on how SD does it.
As you probably noticed, I was speaking in generalities about the various systems used in various states. SOME states do it at courthouses. SOME states do it at dedicated DMV offices in major cities. Others use private contractors. SOME do all 3 in different parts of their state.
Yeah, that was way harsher than it should have been and I apologize.
I just hate seeing generalizations about how ‘rural states’ do this and that from people that have obviously never been to a rural state. Not saying that you’ve never been to a rural state as how would I know. 
No sweat; I agree I sounded a little too cut-and-dried. In my defense the target audience was British & I was trying to avoid too many qualifiers & keeping it simple.
I lived in Missouri for 20 years and Nevada for 10. MO used 3rd party contractors pretty much everywhere; NV used government offices in the more populated counties only and everybody waaay out in the sticks had to drive there. The other few states I’ve lived in been different again.
British only?
In addition to the nifty plate in European countries, there’s also (at least, there used to be when I lived in Germany) the nifty country sticker (for example, CH for Switzerland). Now that’s pretty amateurish, but anyway, how would that work in the US? America has fifty states plus a few populated territories, each of which would need to have their sticker added. It’s already bad enough with all the vanity plates confusing the issue for law enforcement, why make it more difficult? The pre-vanity plate idea of state name on plate and a fairly short combination of letters/numbers worked fairly well, IMHO.
You don’t see them much any more. They used to be mandatory when you crossed a border (which on continental Europe can be very close), but nowadays most countries, even non-EU countries even though the thing started with the EU, introduced the blue stripe with the twelve stars of the EU emblem (for EU countries) or the national flag (for non-EU countries) plus country code on the licence plate itself. I don’t think it helps; sure, it’s easier not to need the sticker and looks more sophisticated, but that code is much harder to read, especially when the car you’re interested in is moving, than the old stickers.
Don’t American plates always spell out the name in full? I know many of them use the state nicknames, but I thought the actual name of the state was still there.
Well, there are a few exceptions, such as the US government-registered vehicles which have a dizzying array of abbreviations and nomenclature all their own. Another exception to spelling out in full are vehicles registered to diplomatic missions in the US.
I think you never forget the numbers of the cars your dad had when you were a kid 
. Many other cars have come and gone since, but CPB 469H is burnt into my memory.
When I was a fleet manager, we used to use the three digits in the middle of the number as shorthand when referring to them, ie - X123ABC would be ‘123’.
When the new style plate was introduced in September 2001, we had to start using the last three characters. ie - BD51SMR would be ‘SMR’. The old style almost never produced duplicates as most of the vehicles were first registered in the same county, but the new style did, which sometimes led to a confusion.
But it’s often in tiny letters or cursive, half (or worse) under the frame.
I think I try a heck of a lot harder than the average US Doper to be aware of our many non-US members. In fact I was specifically clarifying / refuting some posts by US folks that didn’t even think beyond their own states’ borders, much less to the wider world.
It continues to amaze me how many US Dopers have not only lived in just one state their entire lives, but blithely assume the other 49 states use exactly the same laws, terminology, etc. Much less assume without qualification that the rest of the planet also does whatever in the exact same way their locality does.
In the specific post Kimballkid and I were discussing I was answering specific points raised by bob++ and Mangetout. Both are Brits.
I’m (genuinely) sorry if you felt left out. I always enjoy hearing your (and by proxy, Spain’s) perspective on things both large and small.
Nah, just pulling your leg 