Oval White Abbreviated Signs on Cars

There’s a Springfield in the Northwest Territories? Man, those places are everywhere!!! :slight_smile:

FBI

Bar Harbor (but not an ineffable BH).

The surmised to have existed GD.

BIGFY (an advertisement of stupidity)

And, the self-referential parody: SOS.

P

This is outrageous. This is supposed to be a forum for elimination of ignorance, not silly jokes and ignorant guesses.

Some of the answer was provided by Nametag in the thread linked to by everton. He said:

The part about anyone in Europe with a white oval having an old car isn’t quite true though.
It is true that many EU countries have ‘new’ licence plates, which to the left of the actual numbers have the EU emblem and the country code. Within those countries, that is accepted as a ‘country designator’, but I don’t think that it would qualify as the ‘distinguishing sign’ described in the UN convention on Road Traffic. Thus, vehicles in international traffic ought to have the oval sticker, even in those countries. And there are other European countries (both EU members and non-members) where the lience plate does not integrate the above-mentioned country designator. In those cases it is indeed common to see the oval sticker as well.

On a slightly different tack, the country codes[ used to be those listed in the annex 4 of the link above. One problem is that quite a few of those countries don’t exist anymore (e.g. Yugoslavia), have changed name (e.g. Nothern Rhodesia), or have changed status (I don’t think the Algerians drive with ‘F’ stickers anymore.;)) Who desigates new codes for these countries?
Another issue is the I have seen stickers using the ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 codes (e.g. ‘SE’ instead of ‘S’ for Sweden.) Does this correspond to a general trend towards using ISO 3166 on vehicle designators? (In the same way as the Europpean postal union changed the postal codes a couple of years ago, and now prescribe using the ISO 3166.)