California is nearly out of license plate numbers | Hacker News Reader

California is nearly out of license plate numbers

sfchronicle.com

21 pointsrntn32 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20250425000455/http://www.sfchro...

> The current 9-series configuration, which will end with 9ZZZ999, is projected to end sometime in 2026... The next generation of license plates will flip that structure on its head, moving to a “Numeral Numeral Numeral Alpha Alpha Alpha Numeral” format — such as 000AAA0.

Does anyone know why they care about this structure? Naively, there are 36^7 (minus edge cases) combinations available, which will always be sufficient.

It's easier for memory and verbalization.

So for example the capital O on license plates in California is only distinguished from the zero by being slightly more squarish, the capital G is mostly distinguished from six by six being slightly more smooth and diagonal in its top arc. I and one are a bit further visually, as are B and 8, but it would probably fool a traffic camera that was taking down plates automatically.

In addition, all-numbers-plates, I believe, are reserved by California exempt plates (emergency vehicles, police), and vanity plates are absolutely a thing, much more likely to start and/or end on a letter, so that's why you see numbers at the beginning and end. Like you can kinda see “6EIC023” and say “oh yeah my car looks like an ad for Geico” but because the start and end are numbers it doesn't occur to most people.

All-numbers would be worse not better? That's only 10^7, even if they kept the first one 1-9 and did 26^7,they'd have billions, seems like the obvious solution, but I take it there must be some limitations that make it hard to go there.

The DV (Disabled Veteran) plates are notably all-numerical. They are also issued in order of application.

That’s the primary way you can differentiate them at a glance from the DP (Disabled Person) plates.

Just a little odd fact; I know you meant the more standard plates.

The DMV considers the "DP" at the end of a DV plate to be part of the identifier. So DV123DP, in their database.

I think the DV and DP have implicit prefixes (DV and DP respectively) for when they are referenced or recorded.

I may be wrong, but that’s what get when I see them.

So... the headline is BS, and California is just being dumb?

This is not a shock. After moving here, I find that CA's highly-touted "car culture" is pretty retrograde compared to other major metro areas.

Down-modded by flunkie CA administrators.

In addition to the more concrete reasons, abstractly they're getting a bit of extra usage out of the namespace by segmenting it. A 9ZZZ999-type license plate is not just any license plate — it's specifically an ordinary private vehicle (as opposed to a state-owned vehicle or a trailer) that was registered in California between 1980 and 2026, and both of those facts are durably encoded in the number. Notably, both of these are also very human-readable facts, which for most of the existence of the car bureaucracy was extremely germane. The CA DMV got its digital-records act together in the 1990s (this is from memory, it might have been in the Bush years but it certainly wasn't in the '80s and it was a done deal by the Obama era) but there was a long time before that when "just plug it into the DB" was not an option because the DB was a filing cabinet and the query engine was a human digging through it.

Glad they are keeping the 3 letter grouping in the future plates, my dad and I would play a game where you make a word that uses the three letters in the order presented and the longer word wins.

first shortest word proposed seems like the winner to me. or sort of boggle scoring, where ascending lengths of words are scored

I'm wondering how frequently this is just not possible. For example QZV would fail:

    grep "q[a-z]*z[a-z]*v" words

returns nothing.

OP didn't mention a limitation that it has to start and end with these letters.

`Qazvin` is apparently a city in Iran

For me that regex didn’t have that limitation. And my word list didn’t have Qazvin. Still there must be triplets of letters that don’t match any word.

Arizona had AAA000 when I was a kid, then 000AAA, then AAA0000 issued sequentially, but then just before they got through all the plates starting with 'C' they switched to a new system that appears completely random to me. It's a shame, I really enjoyed tracking the progression and knowing whether someone got their plate before or after me.

Illinois has traditionally done the plate stays with the owner, not the car for plates, but I think might be switching to California-style plating now, but I don’t know. They seemed to have relatively random issuance of plate numbers but have the constraint that letters cannot follow digits even on vanity plates (so EL1TE would not be a valid plate).¹ Sometime around 2016ish they started issuing plates sequentially with a scheme of AA 12345 but they had previously issued some plates that were AA1 2345 so presumably they need to skip the conflicting plates that followed that scheme. They’ve never had the kind of clear system that California has where standard plate numbers followed a predictable pattern.

⸻

1. They do, however for specialty plates, have plates which have two letters at the end, usually stacked vertically on the right side of the plate, so, e.g., a stacked SD for people with the duck environmental plate.

Where I live, Gauteng Province in South Africa, our old scheme also ran out about 13 years ago.

It was BBB000 GP to ZZZ999 GP skipping vowels. The replacement scheme is BB00BB GP to ZZ00ZZ GP again skipping vowels.

I’m presently on holiday in a different province which used to have a scheme “like N<single letter for town> #####” but I see now they use the same current scheme as Gauteng except instead of being suffixed with GP (for Gauteng Province), they have ZN (for Kwazulu Natal).

I think it's time for license plates to end.

The function of knowing whether a car is licensed/registered can be accomplished without an ID number (it's not like the stickers they use to show tag expiration have ID numbers).

Similarly, ID'ing a car can now be done with some kind of air-tag like device that could also be privacy protecting.

So if I witness a crime, how would I report the car that committed it? Would my phone give me a list of all the nearby vehicles and then give me some ID number to report?

That system would be cool if it worked, but it would be very complicated to implement.

We're at the point where they can probably just run a photo of the driver against the driver's license photo DB and skip the plate part. That way there's no incentive to steal or obfuscate plates and bring trouble to innocent people either.

I don't typically have a way to get a photo of a driver that's ahead of me.

So the thing I’m wondering is does it go 000AAA0, 000AAA1, … 000AAB0, … or does it go 000AAA0, 001AAA0, … 999AAA0, … 000AAB0, etc.?

I first lived in California during the waning days of the 1XYZ123 plates and while I occasionally saw older cars with 123ABC plates, I never knew the order those were issued.

1963's ABC 123 came first[1] and invalidated earlier plates (but they can be used again under the year of manufacture plate program [2]), when those ran out, they did 123 ABC; when those ran out they did 1ABC123. When all the 1s were issued it was time for 2, etc.

with a trailing 1-9, it will likely be the same. You have a preview with commercial plates which were 1A12345 and are now 12345A1

(edit: linked to two pages with lots of good info)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of...

[2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/vehicle-industry-regi...

Who is going to request 9ZZZ999 as a vanity number, if possible?

I prefer remaining relatively anonymous. Some others seek notoriety. :-)

I tried this but the DMV doesn't let you request it ;-( Alas, probably for the better...

At each DMV there are a stack of license plates that they hand out on-site. So requesting a vanity plate of the same format would probably require them to search those stacks (across all DMVs) to pick out the plate.

Do they give out any vanity plates that are in 0AAA000 format? I could imagine they just don't allow that to keep things simpler.

Current California DMV rules prohibit issuing a vanity plate that matches patterns from sequential plates. When new sequences are used, there's potential for overlap, but I suspect not many people would have picked vanity 'numbers' that match the patterns. Initial zero is unused, but probably still reserved.

You can get an 'environmental plate' issued with a sequential number though, which I believe is less than the vanity plate fee.

And there's some rules around using historic plates on historic vehicles.

I look forward to the scavenger hunt for the bizarro version of my plate. Thought that will be down the road a bit...

Why not using 7 random letters, this is about 4.5 billion combinations, enough for any country.

Except China and India where 8 should be enough.

I am sure there are reasons but I feel that we overcomplicate.

Wyoming could issue 4-character license plates if they used the whole 36^4 space.

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