In motor vehicle crazy cultures like Germany, licence plates are a serious political issue. And one for those longing for the simple old times.
How a country conceives the plates is entertaining, too, as anyone who has followed American licence plate updates can testify. How do German plates differ from modern American ones?
First, Germans don't have slogans on plates.
No, "First in Flight" for instance which has become a claim no longer universally held to be true. No oranges or sunshine.
Second, a strict geographic based system, except for some government agencies. A German plate starts with the county or city, abbreviated, followed by one or two random letters and a number. Generally, the big cities have a single letter abbreviation, for instance B for Berlin, M for Munich, HH for Hamburg.
Our buddy Old Mustached German (OMG) helped make sense of news from a couple of years ago announcing the re-introduction of license plates that had become obsolete. At some point in the last century, maybe the 1970s or 1980, there was a large scale reorganization of local and county boundaries which, as one consequence, meant that licence plates of dissolved counties were replaced by those of newly formed larger counties.
Technological advances made re-issuing the old plates dirt cheap and the police track you by computer anyway now, so the authorities accommodated the nostalgia of the aging locals.
In addition, a statewide licence plate will be introduced later this year, so, instead of having a single plate identifier for our county, we will have four: two re-introduced ones, the current one plus the new statewide one.
Still no U.S. style vanity plates like "ELTIGRE" or LOVEY1", OMG explained.
And counties made up exclusion rules, for instance, no "SS" or "SA". A friend in a county abbreviated as "KG" asked the clerk if they issued a B as middle initial and received a resounding no. To most Germans, a plate where the numerical part is their birthday is the epitomy of personalization.
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