I don’t know if it is worth mentioning, but vehicle plates in the UK are registration plates; vehicle licences exist in the form of a small paper disc that must be displayed in the windscreen and renewed annually or bi-annually. I get the impression that this arrangement is subtly different from elsewhere in the world.
Do they do this in California? I rented a car there last year and I think the plate started 4ZZ… I’d hate to think I was advertising myself even more plainly as a dumbass tourist as I tried to navigate my way out of LA. (Hint for Californian road planners – do not design cities based on plates of pasta.)
In NY (and I think all other states) there’s no such thing as a vehicle ‘license’. A vehicle has a title which serves as proof of ownership. But that’s a formal document that is specifically not to be carried in the car.
Here window stickers and plates are two versions of the same thing. Some states put stickers on the windshield (:D), others put little ones right on the plates themselves.
Antique ones are those with silver letters on a black background?
In Greece the plates do not belong to the car owner; they are property of the state. Also, they can and will remove the plates as a penalty for various infractions (such as parking violations), so they also require them to be bolted for easy removal 
Having your plates removed is super annoying, because you have two choices to get them back: Wait for 1 month and pay a fine, or wait 1 week and pay 3 times the fine.
Yes and no…any car prior to 1971 can use those, even if they’ve got a new (dateless) number. ‘Antique’ plates are those that predate the “X123 ABC” format described somewhere at the top of this thread. My dad has one for his defunct Morris Minor ( 
) which is something like “5606 MC”. Worth a four-figure sum, apparently.
In Greece the plates do not belong to the car owner; they are property of the state. Also, they can and will remove the plates as a penalty for various infractions (such as parking violations), so they also require them to be bolted for easy removal
Having your plates removed is super annoying, because you have two choices to get them back: Wait for 1 month and pay a fine, or wait 1 week and pay 3 times the fine.
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All that shows is that the road tax is paid. It’s not a ‘licence’ in any real sense.
Not as such. The silver and black plates can only by law be fitted to cars first registered before 1 Jan 1973. The year letter at this time was an “L” at the end of the plate. (The year letters were at the end from 1963 to 1983, and then at the beginning from 1983 to 2001.)
The really valuable antique plates are the ones from before the year letter system came into force in 1963. The first plate was “A1” in 1903, which is worth loads. Similarly, old-style plates like BMW1, MG1 and so on are pretty sought after.
The system which preceeded that one was essentialy the same except the positions of the year letter and the three letter code were reversed. The equivalent of the above example would be BCD 123 A
Her Maj. is the only person allowed not to have any plates at all.
It is a tax (or duty), but having one permits you to drive or park a vehicle (which must also be registered) on a public road; why would that not make it a licence to use the road.
By that logic just about any tax could be called a licence.
If payment of that tax procures a document, plate or tag that constitutes legal proof of permission, yes, it could.
My question - why doesn’t the UK have vanity plates? Is it because cheap government-issued vanity plates would collapse the existing license plate market, rendering existing plates that people paid thousands of pounds for worthless? It it something that seems too “American”, and above the dignity and class of the Brits?
An aside: I went to register a new car last week, and asked for personalized plates. I requested a very subtle combination … IML 33T. The combination was available, but the request was denied; in Ohio, you can’t get a personalized plate in a sequence that you would find on a regular non-personalized plate. Three letters followed by three or four numbers, or vice versa, was a no-no.
The powers that be do seem to like a fixed format, which rules out US-style vanity plates. I remember that before the switch to the new format in 2001, described above, there was some debate about whether to get rid of the ‘year letter’ prefix. It distorts the car market by causing surges in sales when the letter changes, but OTOH the police were keen to retain it because crime scene witnesses would very often describe a car as, say, a “T-reg Mondeo”, British people being so accustomed to checking out the year letter of cars. They have retained a year identifier (a number, now), perhaps as a concession to the police, but I’ve yet to hear anybody describe a car as a “51 Fiesta” or whatever.
Why they need a regional identifier as well, I don’t know. Maybe a similar idea - people will notice Hampshire plates in Scotland, say. But there’s such a mix of plates, round here at least, and so little awareness of the regional codes, that I wonder how useful it can be.
In Mass you have a license plate. On the plate you get stickers every year or every other year when you renew your registration. The window sticker is the state safety and emissions sticker, which must be done every year as well. The two different stickers are paid for separately and mean different things. Both are needed.
Some folks though the lobsters were free advertizing for the lobstah and tourism industries. They wanted a potato or tree or moose to balance things out.
In NH someone was taken to court by the state for covering up the state slogan but the courts ruled that as long as it didn’t affect the identification purposes of the plate the owners could cover the slogan. Apparently the irony of trying to force someone to display “Live Free or Die” didn’t bother the state. :smack:
Nope. Our default format for “next off the pile of plates made by prisoners” plates is #XXX### - your 4ZZ… plate was simply right near the end of the 4-series plates. I believe the DMV is handing out plates as “high” as 5G… now. Again, this is purely the first plate in the pile or bin that the DMV clerk gets their hands on.
There are no distinguishing plates for rentals. Typically, the only way to readily identify a car as a rental is a bar-code sticker, typically on the windshild near the VIN plate, or on the rear driver-side window. AFAIK, enterprise is the only rental company that actually puts their logo on the bumper.
Livery (ie: limos) have a plate that not only says “livery” but the numbering is typically something like 1ZZ#####.
Trucks have yet another scheme, something like #X###### - 3C64578, for example.
Finally, (whew!) plates stay with the car in California. If you buy a new car and want to transfer personalized plates to it, it’s a bit of a challenge to find a clerk that understands the process and sequencing of removing the PP from the old car, and retaining them for re-use, issuing new random plates to the old car, then transferring the PP to the new car.
Oh, and not to design roads as plates of pasta? I always thought they were referencing intestines. And you really need to avoid Chicago and its famed Spaghetti Bowl Junction.
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It is a tax (or duty), but having one permits you to drive or park a vehicle (which must also be registered) on a public road; why would that not make it a licence to use the road.[/quotq]
Its official description is a “Road Fund Licence”
I stand corrected. Dang.
You’re asking why the UK doesn’t issue vanity plates but you could as well ask why the USA does. Are there many countries issuing vanity plates?
In France, they’re just issued in order. The last two digit depends on the departement (kind of a county) the rest is like 000 XX or 0000 XX (three or four digit and two letters, at the beginning only one letter) . The first person getting a plate in the “departement” numbered 19, for instance, got 1 A 19, then 2 A 19…then 9999 A 19 then 1 B 19 to 9999 Z 19 then 1 AA 19 to 9999 AZ 19, then 1 BA 19 to 9999 ZZ 19 (theorically). There some exceptions, some couples of letters being reserved for specific use. CD for the diplomats (Corps Diplomatique) or WW for vehicles just bought and without a permanent plate number issued, for instance.
There are no vanity plates , and no plates are sold in auctions, either (anyway, it would be difficult to find something witty with only two letters) . They even discontinued plates with only one (or perhaps even two) digit(s) because they standed out and were sought after (apparently some people in the equivalent of the DMV were keeping for their friends plates with low numbers). For instance, you won’t see anymore a 1 RT 19 plate. That was the most original plate you could have been issued in France.
Anyway, the system used will be discontinued soon (in 2006, I believe) to be replaced with another more uniform within the EU (or more similar to the systems used in the EU, I wouldn’t know) . Maybe it will be the case also in the UK.
Slightly off-topic, but inspired by clairobscur - how many cars is it practical to register using a single 7-9 alphanumeric system? Could the EU be covered by a unified system? What’s the biggest number of cars covered by one system anywhere in the world (does India use a single system or is it regional as in the US)?
None of that explains why French people are prohibited from simply choosing whatever number plate they like.
This is a fundamental human right that we sheep-like Europeans are surrendering too easily. I for one will die before they pry my non-compliant number plate out of my cold, dead hands.