I guess when I said “no vanity plates”, I was on drugs. It would have to be a vanity plate, ordered specifically to make remembering the tag difficult.
Sorry for the confusion.
Here in WI, we had a series of plates that had a collage as a background. The background had some parts of the images that were green and grey. The letters were red. From two car lenghts behind you could not make out what some plates read. I talked a freind of mine who is a cop and he hated them. He would have to get right up on them to read the plate.
Thanks Ender_Will for explaining the CA plates. Thinking about it, I’m pretty sure my rental car plates started 4ZZ, and it was brand new (only 900 miles on the clock before I got my hands on it ). I didn’t see any plates starting with a 5, so I figured they must be sequential.
Back to the original question, one thing to bear in mind is that when trying to remember a plate, you say it to yourself in your mind while scrabbling for a bit of paper to write it down. (Or I do, at least.) So, the fact that “W” has three times as many syllables as any other letter should make it harder to remember. That and the fact that W looks a lot like M - at least on British plates in the new “easier to read” font - leads me to suggest something like
Re: California in the 1980s, I deduced that CA plates beginning with “1” were cars, “2” were trucks and “3” were rental cars? Obviously, this system is no longer in use, but was this correct in the 1980s? Or was my deduction totally wrong?
If you go back and read your link you will see that he starts talking about plates issued in 1969. The original blue plate was 1963 and was in the format ABC 123.
In 1969 they changed to 123 ABC
Rick
(fromer driver of GOF 733 a 1963 Chrysler, and owner of UNA 509 a 1967 Triumph Spitfire)
Where? The specific page I linked to (and the 4 pages of blue plates following it) has no mention of an ABC 123 blue plate, nor of blue plates being used in 1963. It does, however, show that black plates in ABC 123 format were used from 1963 to 1969.
I think that’s wrong. The car plates and truck plates probably both started with 1 at some point. Then, becuse there are fewer possible combinations of truck plates (because there are fewer letters in them), the new truck plates went to 2 faster than the car plates did.
So, probably in the '80’s there was a time when new car plates happened to start with 1 and new truck plates started with 2. Now, new car plates start with 5, and new truck plates are up to 6, I beleve.
Doh! that what happens when you get old. I forgot that the 63 plates were black and yellow. Sheezh you would think that if I could recall the license plate number of the first cars I owned, I would remember the color of the plate. :smack: :smack:
I was correct about the order of the letters / numbers, I just went colorblind in my memory. ntucker I bow to you sir. Great link BTW.
About requesting a vanity plate with IOI 101 and hoping to confuse onlookers, this would not work in California as they prohibit 3 letter/3 number combos. Along with letter combos like CHP, DMV
I recently got my vanity plates. It used to be that the numbers on a plate were embossed.
My plates look like,no lie, I printed them up on my home printer, except metal instead of paper.
Granted they do have a slight reflectiveness to them and they have, upon close expection, have the seal of Texas all over them. When my plates gets a little dirty, both of these features seem to disapear.
Isn’t this rather problematic? I know you can easily steal someone’s plates…but this just seems insanely easy.
By serendipidy I once had a plate SNH-918 (those are the right digits, I just can’t remember the order–so sue me, it was 15 years ago) which upside-down reads 816-HNS. That might be a clever method–to get a plate number that you could flip over and it would look like a valid tag.
). I didn’t see any plates starting with a 5, so I figured they must be sequential.
